I'd like to express the same sentiment against all-pervasive telemetry in a far less civil way but dont want this comment deleted.

I really wish I could use stronger language though....

With all this backlash on telemetry, is it worth it? What are you actually getting from it beside ruining the progress MS has made with the dev community? Trust is hard to earn and takes seconds to lose.

Remove it. Then champion removing it from the rest of MS’s products. If you must spy to learn your market, you should not be in that market.

I still hold onto a Sublime Text license waiting for the day MS shows it’s true purpose of making VS code free. Has this day come?

If you're interested in collecting feedback and passing it on, the other criticism I have in this area is that Microsoft's privacy policies are incomprehensible. Everything seems to refer to the same huge document in the first instance and that document seems to depend by reference on numerous supporting documents. Even figuring out which supporting documents might be relevant seems to require understanding ambiguous terminology about whether any given application or service fits into various categories.

Personally, I'm not interested in messing around with that kind of nonsense. I don't want to engage a lawyer just to find out if I can safely run some software and in the modern world where we're dealing with things like personal data and sensitive business information (including code and clients' proprietary information used to write it) an organisation with Microsoft's recent track record on privacy isn't going to get the benefit of the doubt.