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Nvidia Adds Telemetry To Latest Drivers (ghacks.net)
An anonymous reader shares a report on Ghack: Telemetry -- read tracking -- seems to be everywhere these days. Microsoft pushes it on Windows, and web and software companies use it as well. While there is certainly some benefit to it on a larger scale, as it may enable these companies to identify broader issues, it is undesirable from a user perspective. Part of that comes from the fact that companies fail to disclose what is being collected and how data is stored and handled once it leaves the user system. In the case of Nvidia, Telemetry gets installed alongside the driver package. While you may customize the installation of the Nvidia driver so that only the bits that you require are installed, there is no option to disable the Telemetry components from being installed. These do get installed even if you only install the graphics driver itself in the custom installation dialog.Further reading on MajorGeeks.
Installing nvidia has always been a bit of a pain in Linux...
In the *buntus (and I would presume Debian), it is very simple:
apt-get install nvidia-current
Or you can use the newbie-friendly GUI to install it.
That said, I stopped buying NVidia cards about a year ago. The Open Source AMD driver is good enough for my needs (desktop, simple gaming, 3D modeling), and continues to improve rapidly. Now, I can add "respects my privacy".
Not that we should ban telemetry outright, but in the very least, we should know what data is being reported.
You don't have a right to the data on my machine, even if you wrote the software that generates it.
-- The End-User Manifesto
All this time I wondered what AMD could possibly do to convince me to try their video cards again. Now I know it was nVidia that had to do something all along.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The thing about software like this, whether it be Microsoft, nVidia, or whoever, is that they have FULL access to your computer. Not just the current user, they have administrator access. They could, either by choice, accident or malice, send ANYTHING they want off of your computer. Tax forms, SSN's, bank account information, passwords, personal photos, etc.
That's fucked up.
A boilerplate shrinkwrap EULA does not count as asking for it. There is no meeting of the minds.
Give me a checkbox to disable it (even if it is enabled by default) and I'll not whinge. Make it a PITA to disable and I'm livid.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If companies allowed me to install my own telemetry software on their systems to report back to me, it would be very helpful and give me a better understanding of how the company is run and how their products are developed. It would help consumers determine what features of the software the companies are putting their funding and effort towards the most.