Visual Studio 2022 - Telemetry related temp folders

Question

After installing VS 2022-Enterprise, I noticed VSTelem and VSTelem.Out folders under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Temp. This was not happening with VS 2019. How can I disable the Telemetry feature?

Answer 1

Solved: Help->Privacy->Privacy Settings and opt-out!

Answer 2

Given how I consider all this telemetry and data collection as a form of bullying (we are paying for the product and telemetry is turning us into beta testers while data collection is further monetizing us), I have developed a different approach to disabling it in a couple of easy steps.

1. Get yourself a router / firewall device which supports REGEX in static DNS configuration (Mikrotik does for example).

2. Add the following regular expressions as DNS host names:

   # Microsoft (Windows, Browser)
   v10c?\.(events|vortex-win)\.data\.microsoft\.com
   ((um|km)?watsonc?|oca)(\.telemetry)?\.microsoft\.com
   
   # Visual Studio
   .*\.services\.visualstudio\.com
   
   # NVIDIA
   (activation|events|telemetry)\.gfe\.nvidia\.com
   

3. Set those entries to resolve to NXDOMAIN and set a long TTL such as 365 days.

4. Block direct outbound connections on port 53 UDP/TCP for your LAN subnet except for your router / firewall IP (easiest way to do that is to perform DNAT for any such request to your router / firewall DNS server).

5. Block direct outbound DNS over HTTPS connections to popular services (cloudflare, google, opendns, etc) for your LAN subnet except for your router / firewall IP in order to force clients to fall back to your router / firewall DNS. You can of course use DoH on the router itself if you so desire.

Problem solved forever for all devices on your network.