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.

Comments

Pepperidge Farm Remembers

[lobiusmoop]

For entertainment value, here's the Nvidia driver download page from 2001, with the driver weighing in at 6Mb.

Compare with 15 years later, driver is now 300Mb....

Software bloat at it's finest.

Pretty sure this would against EU privacy law

[aepervius]

I am 100% certain that they would only be able to collect only crash data from EU citizen, as anything else, including usage or even something as simple as the percentage of pink pixel would break privacy laws and the right of correction.

I wonder the liability

[Alain Williams]

You suddenly find £2,000 gone from your bank account and the bank blames you (as not in this Tesco case). You audit; you are up to date with all virus bashing software, etc, ... how else could your data have gone ? You then find that 'telemetry' is being sucked from your machine, Nvidia/Microsoft/... refuse to disclose what they have taken from your machine; they will not say how they protect what they have taken or who they share it with. Can you go after them ?