[SOLVED] How much telemetry does VLC send? Should I ditch it?

linux-man · 03-07-2022, 11:37 PM

How much telemetry does VLC send? Should I ditch it? I did uncheck their 3rd party requests upon starting vlc up for first time in debian 11. Is there more info being sent regardless?

Is this the right section to post this?

wpeckham · 03-08-2022, 09:19 AM

What makes you think VLC is sending data?

linux-man · 03-08-2022, 09:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by wpeckham

What makes you think VLC is sending data?

No solid evidence as yet, but heard other programs do.

suramya · 03-09-2022, 04:24 AM

None as far as I can tell. From their privacy section

Quote:

VLC

VLC software does not use any user account, and does not collect any user data, when working.

VideoLAN does not collect any data, nor any telemetry, when VLC is being run.

However, some limited personal information could be collected or shared in 3 precise cases:

during the crash report process,
during updates checking,
for metadata retrieval.

VLC crash reporting

When VLC on Windows or VLC on macOS crash, a dialog popup suggesting to share the crash with VideoLAN can be shared.
If accepted, some information can go to the VideoLAN servers:

Operating System version,
CPU and GPU,
Symbolic StackTrace of the process,
List of DLLs loaded by the process.

This data is only sent on explicit request from the user.

This data does not contain any name, username, email from the user or IP from the user.

This data can be deleted on request.

This data is kept for 6 months, before deletion.
VLC update mechanism

When VLC on Windows or VLC on macOS wants to check if a new version is available, a request is made to the VideoLAN servers.
This request can contain:

Operating System version,
CPU version,
VLC version.

Since vlc is opensource, anyone with programming skills can look at the code to validate that the above is correct or not. So far I don't see any claims that this is the case.(based on a quick net search)