It is very difficult to tell if a program is respecting user’s privacy without the source code to verify what it’s actually doing. When you can’t see or change what it does then the developer is the one in control of the computing, and even a good intentioned dev will have to resist the temptation to gain at the user’s expense.
There’s nothing wrong with proprietary software as long as it’s respects user’s privacy and doesn’t do crazy licensing stuff.
It is very difficult to tell if a program is respecting user’s privacy without the source code to verify what it’s actually doing. When you can’t see or change what it does then the developer is the one in control of the computing, and even a good intentioned dev will have to resist the temptation to gain at the user’s expense.
VSCode is open source and yet Microsoft still pushes telemetry crap into it.
One advantage of FOSS is that you can fork it! VSCodium (presumably, I never really checked) takes all of the crapware out of VSCode.