Visual Studio 2022 - Telemetry related temp folders

Question

After installing VS 2022-Enterprise, I noticed VSTelem and VSTelem.Out folders under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Temp. This was not happening with VS 2019. How can I disable the Telemetry feature?

Disaffiliate

I'm not against user behavior research like this, but these guys think that workstation SSD's are free? On my computer it eats 2.4GB (%LOCALAPPDATA%\Temp\VSTelem folder). – Anh

Choosing prime real estate to put that data just adds insult to injury in my opinion. – Disaffiliate

Got a Windows notification about low disk space. Started cleaning stuff. My folder "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Temp\VSTelem\NgenPdb" is 11.1 GB! – Gensler

Answer 1

Solved: Help->Privacy->Privacy Settings and opt-out!

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There is official documentation for it. However it is worth noting, that Microsoft will collect data as part of the VS suite of applications and through Windows telemetry regarding the operation of the IDE. – Vaulted

Answer 2

It's not possible to completely disable telemetry via VS itself:

Theophrastus

Well, not through conventional means, at least. Any connection can be blocked with sufficient motivation. – Atomic

Highly recommend using Windows Firewall Control (it's a GUI for the integrated Windows Firewall) to block certain VS processes (some solely for collecting data) completely. Can always temporarily be disabled – Berkman

@Berkman That's a very good recommendation. Could you please provide a list of processes to be blocked? – Disaffiliate

There is a wealth of processes that ship with recent VS versions like ServiceHub.*.exe (e.g. ServiceHub.DataWarehouseHost.exe). You find these in (e.g.) C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\Common7\ServiceHub. Other processes include VSDiagnostics.exe (DiagnosticsHub folder), and vctip.exe which is executed often when compiling, identified as "Microsoft VC compiler and tools experience improvement data uploader". All in all there is a lot of activity and I highly suggest using Windows Firewall Control in popup mode to see what happens, for each individual process, and when. – Berkman

Answer 3

Given how I consider all this telemetry and data collection as a form of bullying (we are paying for the product and telemetry is turning us into beta testers while data collection is further monetizing us), I have developed a different approach to disabling it in a couple of easy steps.

1. Get yourself a router / firewall device which supports REGEX in static DNS configuration (Mikrotik does for example).

2. Add the following regular expressions as DNS host names:

   # Microsoft (Windows, Browser)
   v10c?\.(events|vortex-win)\.data\.microsoft\.com
   ((um|km)?watsonc?|oca)(\.telemetry)?\.microsoft\.com
   
   # Visual Studio
   .*\.services\.visualstudio\.com
   
   # NVIDIA
   (activation|events|telemetry)\.gfe\.nvidia\.com
   

3. Set those entries to resolve to NXDOMAIN and set a long TTL such as 365 days.

4. Block direct outbound connections on port 53 UDP/TCP for your LAN subnet except for your router / firewall IP (easiest way to do that is to perform DNAT for any such request to your router / firewall DNS server).

5. Block direct outbound DNS over HTTPS connections to popular services (cloudflare, google, opendns, etc) for your LAN subnet except for your router / firewall IP in order to force clients to fall back to your router / firewall DNS. You can of course use DoH on the router itself if you so desire.

Problem solved forever for all devices on your network.

Britisher