Visual Studio Code

❗Article Status Notice: This Article is a stub

---

This article is underdeveloped, and needs additional work to meet the wiki's Content Guidelines and be in line with our Mission Statement for comprehensive coverage of consumer protection issues. Learn more ▼

Issues may include:

• This article needs to be expanded to provide meaningful information
• This article requires additional verifiable evidence to demonstrate systemic impact
• More documentation is needed to establish how this reflects broader consumer protection concerns
• The connection between individual incidents and company-wide practices needs to be better established
• The article is simply too short, and lacks sufficient content

How you can help:

• Add documented examples with verifiable sources
• Provide evidence of similar incidents affecting other consumers
• Include relevant company policies or communications that demonstrate systemic practices
• Link to credible reporting that covers these issues
• Flesh out the article with relevant information

This notice will be removed once the article is sufficiently developed. Once you believe the article is ready to have its notice removed, please visit the Moderator's noticeboard, or the Discord (join here) and post to the #appeals channel, or mention its status on the article's talk page.

Visual Studio Code

File:Visual-studio-code.png

Basic Information
Release Year	2015
Product Type	Software
In Production	Yes
Official Website	https://code.visualstudio.com

Visual Studio Code is an integrated development environment developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, macOS and web browsers.

Consumer impact summary

Overview of concerns that arise from the conduct towards users of the product (if applicable):

• User Freedom
• User Privacy
• Business Model
• Market Control

---

Add your text below this box. Once this section is complete, delete this box by clicking on it and pressing backspace.

Freedom

The Source Code is available on GitHub under the MIT License.

However, the binaries published by Microsoft are proprietary under the "Microsoft Software License" and ships with closed-source modifications.

Alternate fully open source forks exists like VS Codium.

Incidents

Telemetry enabled by default

Microsoft's proprietary build sends telemetry data by default which goes under Microsoft's Privacy Statement. It has to be disabled manually by setting telemetry.telemetryLevel to off in the user settings.

Blocking extensions for third-party forks

In April 2025, Microsoft pushed an update to the "C/C++" extension for Visual Studio Code that introduced functionality to entirely disable the extension under the condition that it was running inside of a third-party fork of the editor, displaying an error that says:

"The C/C++ extension may be used only with Microsoft Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, Visual Studio Code, Azure DevOps, Team Foundation Server, and successor Microsoft products and services to develop and test your applications."