# How to disable Gatsby telemetry

Telemetry is a clean sounding euphemism for tracking.

Gatsby gives you a notice when you first start it:

![Screen shot of a telemetry message](/images/gatsby-telemetry-message.png)

Gatsby’s telemetry announcement

> Gatsby collects anonymous usage analytics to help improve Gatsby for all
> users.

In your `~/.config` directory, Gatsby has created some files related to
telemetry:

```
gatsby/
├── config.json
├── events.json
└── sites/
    └── 1932d81eba27c5c367844801f29aa32e/
        ├── developproxy.json
        ├── developstatusserver.json
        ├── metadata.json
        ├── recipesgraphqlserver.json
        └── telemetryserver.json
```

If you look into the `config.json`, you can see that tracking is enabled by
default:

```json
{
  "telemetry": {
    "machineId": "72a8ea824-93ee-568a-f458-2bdab942a597",
    "enabled": true
  },
  "feedback": {
    "firstCheckDate": 1608330787473
  }
}
```

Like the note said, it can be turned off:

```shell
$ gatsby telemetry --disable
```

If you don’t have Gatsby installed globally, call the local Gatsby binary from
the `.bin`:

```shell
$ node_modules/.bin/gatsby telemetry --disable
```

You can also define an environment variable in your `.env` file or elsewhere:

```
GATSBY_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1
```

You can
[read more about how and why they track you](https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/telemetry/),
and the
[telemetry related code](https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/tree/master/packages/gatsby-telemetry)
is also open source, like the rest of Gatsby.