Discussion on: How to Write Code 4X Faster with GitHub Copilot in VS Code

[Nikhil Chandra Roy]

One question remains, will it collect secret data for large projects?
I see that many code editors already have this type of feature as a default, like Windsurf, Trae, and more.

[Ramkumar M N]

Hi Nikhil,
That's a great question! I hadn't thought of mentioning about it when I wrote the article, and I appreciate you bringing it up at the right time.

We need to disable telemetry either for the entire editor (VS Code telemetry) or specifically for GitHub Copilot. Attaching both options.

Disable VS code telemetry

• Go to settings
• Type 'telemetry'
• Select Telemetry under Application
• On the bottom you can see the below option. select off

Note: If this setting is 'off', no telemetry will be sent regardless of other telemetry settings. If this setting is set to anything except 'off' and telemetry is disabled with deprecated settings, no telemetry will be sent.

Disable GitHub copilot telemetry

• Go to Settings
• Search copilot
• On the bottom you can see Github copilot Advance -click on it, it will open a JSON file
• Mark "telemetry.telemetryLevel" as off

  "telemetry.telemetryLevel": "off", // latest
   or
  "telemetry.enableTelemetry": false, // old, Deprecated

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Finally restart the editor. Hope this will work

• As per the documentation and reference
• No explicit collection of secrets from Copilot
• Copilot does not intentionally collect sensitive data.

But if you accidentally include secrets (like API keys) in your code, it might process them. So it could take the sensitive data

Regards,
Ram