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I really like the text editor Atom, but it collects a lot of data and transmits it to GitHub and Google. It also uses your MAC address in order to generate a unique identifier which is also sent to the servers.

There seem to be thousands of forks of Atom on GitHub. Do you know if there is a fork that strips out all that nasty stuff?

I am aware that some of the telemetry can be disabled, but it is enabled by default and thus I assume that it will just send data until I disable it. In addition to that there is no option to disable sending crash data.

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  • Great question! If you don't find an answer, consider creating you own fork; or, just configure your firewall to block all outgoing traffic to the offending IP Address (range)
    – Mawg says reinstate Monica
    Mar 2, 2018 at 14:16
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    Blocking all traffic to Google and Github may severely limit your accesses later on, for whatever browsing/git queries you may have outside of Atom.
    – Patrick Mevzek
    Mar 2, 2018 at 17:58
  • After being beaten by javascript, Microsoft's strategy has been to buy up everything popular in the javascript tool chain, control what they keep, and discontinue anything that competes with Visual Studio. Complain about it, and be censored! I too am looking for an Atom fork that Microsoft cannot deliberately destroy.
    – Lonnie Best
    Jun 21 at 5:23
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    I'm using VSCodium now btw. A fork of VSCode without the proprietary parts and the telemetry.
    – Forivin
    Jun 21 at 7:54

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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According to Atom Asks About Telemetry Atom 1.11 asks for permission to send telemetry data the first time you use it.

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  • Yeah, but it is very easy to miss because it's just in one of the four tabs that are open by default. And it doesn't exactly ask for permission. There are simply two buttons "send data" and "don't send data". So it's not safe to assume that nothing gets sent if you just ignore it.
    – Forivin
    Mar 6, 2018 at 20:19
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    Based on github.com/atom/atom/… you can put telemetryConsent: 'no' in your config file. See github.com/atom/atom/pull/12281
    – Patrick Mevzek
    Mar 7, 2018 at 14:47

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