Oh bloody hell of course Microsoft is pulling off stunts like this. Thanks for raising this, I'll have a look at what my options are to turn this off.

Tauri 2.0 was initially chosen because it would let me get an MVP out quickly to start getting user feedback (like your own). My end goal is to move to a custom renderer so I'm not relying on Chromium / WebView2. This will take many months of work I suspect (balancing with my FYP @ university & other projects).

Here is a whole story: https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/discussions/4089

tl;dr - Tauri uses platform's default implementation of a webview. On Windows it's WebView2 which reports back to MS.

Can you show others how you did this in a post? Truly neat

This? Finding outbound/inbound requests to an app?

Not sure it's worth an entire post. But:

The application in question is NetLimiter for Windows https://www.netlimiter.com/ (I'm sure there are others, btw)

It acts as a per-application firewall. It also has the ability to block internet access completely, as well as Priorities (bandwith allocation) per application.

By default it will pop up a window every time an application makes web requests, either inbound or outbound.

You have the option to Deny or Allow the operation. And options to have that be temporary (next x minutes) or permanent.

After being set up an alarming number of applications will cause NetLimiter popups, but very soon everything will either be allowed or blocked.

So I spoke to one of the contributors of Tauri who got back to me with the following response: " It's not a thing tauri controls and the telemetry settings are an operating system setting since you are running windows this kind of telemetry is not completely avoidable."

He also kindly pointed to this GH Issue which discusses your privacy concern: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/105...

This quote from the issue stood out in particular: " WebView2 is considered a Windows component, and the data collection consent is governed by Windows Diagnostic setting on Windows 10 as a centralized switch.

End users are empowered to control the data collection of WebView2 and can do so via toggling the Windows Diagnostic setting on Windows 10. This is also what the Edge browser does. On Windows 7/8.1, because there is no Windows Diagnostic setting, we treat this as no consent for optional data. There is very limited required data that the OS always collects, unless you're on some specific SKUs. Developers are definitely welcomed to convey that to their end users and ask them to use the OS toggle. "

I've been meaning to move away from Tauri + WebView2, this might be the best call to make (not only for this reason of course)