Visual Studio 2015 is Spyware

[eckso]

I know you aren't aware of this as now this is a mandatory component for the master branch, but I would like to call out that a big amount of people might be installing Microsoft spyware just because of Dolphin.
It allocates a big amount of RAM size to new VS related processes and it tries to communicate home online.
I'm unsure if this applies to all VS 2015 versions (development or not) but simply read further, it's frightening.

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/174478-visual-studio-2015-also-adds-spys-to-win781/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31452435/how-do-i-disable-vshub-exe-in-the-system-tray/32282345#32282345

[Red Buzzy Beetle]

So I'm a little unclear, what exactly does the program do that constitutes it being considered spyware? It is the online communication part? And yes I did read both linked pages.

[Shonumi]

Don't a handful of Microsoft products "phone home" anyway? I'm not as well versed with Windows now as I used to be back with XP, but I'm under the impression that this sort of behavior is VS2015 is nothing new for Microsoft and innocuous for users.

[Daeoc]

(09-20-2015, 02:53 AM)Shonumi Wrote: Don't a handful of Microsoft products "phone home" anyway? I'm not as well versed with Windows now as I used to be back with XP, but I'm under the impression that this sort of behavior is VS2015 is nothing new for Microsoft and innocuous for users.

Also, to use Dolphin you don't need Visual Studio 2015 itself, just the Visual C++ Redistributable VS2015, the run-time components that you need to run the programs that are built using VS2015.

[UltraJake]

What's that you say? A cloud-enabled program that can check for updates and download Microsoft's symbols library contacts Microsoft?
I'll be sure to contact the NSA.

[Red Buzzy Beetle]

Just had an idea; I wonder, maybe some part in the User Agreement for Visual Studio 2015 (if it has a User Agreement) would tell you anything of interest regarding the program's capabilities?

I know that when I install a program I rarely if ever read the entire agreement (too long!) but maybe if you went back and looked for a privacy statement of some sort it would shed some light on the situation?

[AnyOldName3]

Microsoft have stated several times in several places that any spying their software does is completely anonymised before being sent home, and it's only used to work out how people use their software (and therefore which things need to be more accessible etc.) and isn't stored or sold on, and would be completely valueless to anyone that wasn't writing Microsoft software. It's about as innocent as anything spying on end users can be. It's still spying, though, so some people aren't going to be happy with it, even if it is just stuff like '90% of button presses are the save button'. If people care about it, they shouldn't be using Windows builds of Dolphin anyway.

[eckso]

Thanks Daeoc, yes it looks like it's the development tool not the redistributable. But at this rate who knows what Microsoft's next step will be.

@AnyOldName3: It's undocumented (for a reason), useless (never needed such thing before) and performance crippling (more RAM and bandwidth usage) without an option to turn off. Fishy? No. Frightening!.

[Nintonito]

(09-21-2015, 04:23 PM)eckso Wrote: Thanks Daeoc, yes it looks like it's the development tool not the redistributable. But at this rate who knows what Microsoft's next step will be.

@AnyOldName3: It's undocumented (for a reason), useless (never needed such thing before) and performance crippling (more RAM and bandwidth usage) without an option to turn off. Fishy? No. Frightening!.

Performance crippling? Seriously that's where I draw the line.  Sending basic encrypted text files and log info does not affect performance in any way.  

[Helios]

Applications phoning home on usage statistics is nothing new and hardly unique to visual studio. Is it spyware? Well, if your definition is so strict that you're the kind of person to personally inspect every packet that leaves your machine, I guess.

It's a non-issue, and anybody installing the runtimes and not vs2015 has no data collected (Because they aren't using the IDE. Herp Derp.)