Immich ML reportedly sends telemetry to Microsoft by default via ONNX Runtime

Default telemetry reported in Immich's ML container

A post on dev.to has raised a privacy concern about Immich, an open-source, self-hosted photo application: its machine learning container reportedly ships with telemetry in Microsoft's ONNX Runtime enabled by default, causing deployments to send DNS queries to a Microsoft telemetry endpoint.

What is reportedly happening

According to the dev.to post, Immich's machine learning service uses ONNX Runtime, a library for running machine learning inference. The post says ONNX Runtime turns telemetry on by default — a behavior it attributes to the library's own privacy documentation — and that Immich's Docker deployment does not override the setting.

The consequence, as described, is that a running container issues DNS queries to mobile.events.data.microsoft.com during operation, whether or not the service is processing photographs at that moment. The author acknowledges Microsoft's position that the data collected this way is anonymized, but argues that any outbound traffic from a self-hosted photo application conflicts with the expectation that users keep full control of their data and infrastructure.

The risks the post highlights

Two concerns stand out. First, the author speculates that if telemetry payloads ever included metadata or hashes derived from processed images, sensitive or proprietary pictures could be indirectly exposed — a possibility the post raises without demonstrating what is actually transmitted beyond the DNS lookups. Second, unexplained DNS queries to an outside vendor can look like unauthorized communication to administrators monitoring their own networks.

The post also states that the issue was reported to Immich's developers in August and remained unaddressed at the time of writing, a delay the author argues risks normalizing privacy gaps in software whose users adopted it for privacy in the first place.

How to turn the telemetry off

The post prescribes three measures:

1. Set the environment variable ORT_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 on the immich-machine-learning container. The post says this intercepts ONNX Runtime's telemetry initialization and stops requests to Microsoft's endpoint.
2. Isolate the containers on a Docker network defined with internal: true and the bridge driver. Outbound traffic from that network is discarded, so containers cannot reach external addresses; only the reverse proxy keeps outside connectivity.
3. Verify the result. DNS logs should no longer show queries for mobile.events.data.microsoft.com, and attempts to reach an external IP from inside a container should fail under the isolated network.

The author's closing argument is that such workarounds place the burden on users to undo behavior introduced by default configuration, and that responsibility for privacy belongs with the developers shipping the software.

Why it matters

Self-hosted photo tools like Immich appeal to users precisely because they promise data sovereignty, and a default-on telemetry path to Microsoft — even with anonymized data — sits awkwardly with that promise. Most users will never inspect a container's DNS traffic, so defaults largely determine the outcome.

The episode also points to a systemic issue the post emphasizes: third-party libraries can carry default behaviors that clash with the values of the applications embedding them, and privacy audits of dependencies remain rare in open-source development. For each project that gets called out, others are likely shipping similar defaults unnoticed. Until privacy-respecting defaults become the norm, self-hosters have reason to treat every dependency, and every container's outbound traffic, as something worth verifying.