Is pycharm collecting telemetry in community edition?

Yes

@inaba is there any fork like vs codium for vs code?

Well they gotta get some benefits of providing it for free..

@NarkoCat because privacy matters my friend.

@-pthread Yes. And there's also VSCodium which is quite alright although personally I use code-oss (aur)

@NarkoCat Not to go into a deep privacy conversation but you're not the one who decides what information is interesting ;)

Why are @NarkoCat's comments cencored.

@electrineer didn't understand.

@NarkoCat I can't see your earlier comments in this rant. I only see them if I go to your profile.

@electrineer
1.why is collecting telemetry an issue?
2. They don't collect anything that can hurt you. You can just not use pycharm.

Idk if you are trolling or not..

@NarkoCat It depends on ones opinion but for me it comes down to:
- Its my computer, I'll decide what happens on it and leaves my machine (to the extend I choose)
- Sometimes identifiable information is collected of which you don't know how its used (the Microsoft bug reports intercepted by the NSA for example). Not saying its happening here but it's a valid concern.
- how can one be sure that the data is stored securely? I'd rather not take that chance if its my choice.
- I'm not sure about what data is collected and I'm uncomfortable with that (might be just me not knowing the product well enough but that's up to me).
- Maybe the data is collected by an external company which I don't want my computer to connect to (analytics companies in general, Facebook (or Facebook owned companies), google (or google owned companies) etc).

As for your second point, I refer to my first comment.

@linuxxx umm. I didnt bring up any points, but repeated my first comments, because some dude {who may or may not be trolling) said that he couldn't see them. :D
Bur for rest tl;dr; don't care about the subject, sorry. I value your dedication to answer with a lot of explanation.

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but can they collect telemetry data even if I'm sitting behind a proxy?

@Mosesrocks If they have code running on your machine, they can collect anything they like. Also, a proxy doesn't protect at all against fingerprinting. or cookies, etc.

For fingerprinting, think how many devices have your exact hardware (mobo, cpu, audio, nic, wnic, display, etc.), browser, browser plugins, screen resolution, refresh rate, timezone, cpu benchmarks, region and language settings, etc. Basically none. All of this is readable, and none of it relies upon your network connection. If there's a very close match except for some e.g. location or timezone information, the targeted user is moving, on vacation, etc.

Large companies share fingerprinting data, and are often forced to share it with their country's government. Also, as soon as a computer signs in with e.g. a google/facebook/etc. account, its fingerprint is now personally identifiable. If they sign in with multiple accounts, all of those people are either the same person, or related by either family or sharing the same house. This is how you build a user relationship map. Works wonders for marketing purposes, and shared devices are only minimally harmful for e.g. swaying political views, since family and friends tend to hold similar views, and also work to influence one another. (And yes, this is one of Google's aims. Facebook, too. And ofc China's government, NK's, Iran's, Saudi Arabia, etc. etc. etc.). They want to sway your vote towards what is in their best interest. Opinions on events, too, and if they're your primary source for news... that isn't difficult to do since they can very easily tailor what content you see, and create an echo chamber.

t;ldr "Telemetry" used to mean usage statistics; now it means data mining. Both large companies and governments use this data to advertise and track and manipulate people for their own gain. And as for politics (and therefore corruption): it's almost always at your expense.

So: be careful what software you run, what services you use, and what data they have access to. There's a reason some people fight so hard (and pay so much to e.g. lobbyists) to strip away your privacy. and that reason is money and/or control.

@Root Thanks for the elaborate answer. Holy shit that's scary. What can I actually do against this? I don't remember pycharm anouncing that it was collecting this type of data when I installed it.

@Mosesrocks It might or might not do fingerprinting, I don't know. But fingerprinting is more useful, and therefore more valuable, to advertisers than anything else, so it's still likely. Read its privacy policy; that should tell you what it collects, or at least hint at it. Though keep in mind that companies generally make these sound as innocuous as they can (and some have gotten into legal trouble for lying in theirs). For an example, Google's privacy policy really doesn't sound scary at all, despite them collecting and storing and analyzing literally everything they can and tracking you across what's close to 75% of websites now.

@Mosesrocks you can use as much open-source software as possible and also read privacy policy as mentioned by @root cause open-source software may also collect telemetry but because of open-source nature you may find appropriate fork or you can remove components you don't like and compile software by yourself. You can also divide your usage in different sandboxed system. Ex: many browsers provide facility to create different profile and you can keep one profile for extreme personal usage, one for work, one for online shopping etc. if you are interested checkout sites like privacytools.io, privacyblog etc.