Turn off telemetry in SQL Server install config file

Question

I'm creating a SQL Server 2017 Image Completion config file, and the automatically generated one has a bunch of stuff about "telemetry". I clicked no to the prompts, but it still put several user accounts in the config file, yet no true/false option for the telemetry itself. Here are the user accounts it included in the config file:

; TelemetryUserNameConfigDescription

SQLTELSVCACCT="NT Service\SQLTELEMETRY"

; TelemetryStartupConfigDescription

SQLTELSVCSTARTUPTYPE="Automatic"

; ASTelemetryStartupConfigDescription

ASTELSVCSTARTUPTYPE="Automatic"

; ASTelemetryUserNameConfigDescription

ASTELSVCACCT="NT Service\SSASTELEMETRY"

; TelemetryUserNameConfigDescription

ISTELSVCACCT="NT Service\SSISTELEMETRY140"

; TelemetryStartupConfigDescription

ISTELSVCSTARTUPTYPE="Automatic"

I suppose I could change the startup type to manual, but I would rather just remove all this garbage. Any idea how to turn this off via config file?

Answer 1

as far as i know, the only way to disable telemetry is to change the registry keys later. There is no actual harm to having those accounts, I don't think.