Activate advanced view of preferences. By default “Locally collected statistic” is turned on. Hover a mouse over this and you will see an enigmatic explanation: “Collect miscellaneous local statistic about the playing media”. Not to be paranoid, but since a lot of “linux” software goes “data harvesting” (They have nice PR names for those like: “statistics”, “telemetry”, and other nice names for those spywares as well as a neat explanation: “it for your own good”, “we need those” and of course “everyone is spying, we spy less, so since others spy more you need not to worry - this is harmless”).
Well since its harmless why does it collect data of every video I have played (including hashes of the file, timestamps, unique ID of VLC etc.). But I leave it to you to decide if you you can still ignore it.
IIRC, every time I’ve run VLC in whose ever distribution, a data-collection screen has always been displayed upon first-run. It’s not spyware. https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/vlc.html
Regardless of initial popup its still turned on. It harmless right? Since you clicked the popup. No need to worry that its still checked on and in the advanced properties it till scollects data. Well KDE also has this “opt-in” “feature”. Slider to the left… and… is it off? No it still collects data. Good luck.
