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from the nothing-to-see-here;-move-along dept.
NVidia's latest video card driver for Windows (version 375.70), adds telemetry tracking.
While you may -- and should -- 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.
Most users who use PCs with Nvidia video cards probably don't even know that they are tracked by the software. The Nvidia telemetry service runs in the background on user log on, and additionally once a day.
The article goes into detail on how to disable the new Nvidia telemetry, but it also mentions that the telemetry may require disabling again after every video card driver update. No mention of if the telemetry tracking made its way into the Linux binary blob... yet.
Resistance is futile?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @04:29PM
>Telemetry is useful. Helps developers know if something is wrong...
So is the classic 'help line, comment forums, complaint department, etc.' In other words if people have problems they should be able to reach out and file a bug. Silently, anonymously, perpetually, remotely, and unpreventable gathering of ANY information on peoples' computers or settings, (as harmless as it may seem), is VIEWED poorly by the people being reported on.
Of course it's anonymous data, and focused on 'your' product that you develop for... but really... would you be OK with someone sitting in the park, taking notes on every person walking by, whilst looking them in the eye so that they are very aware of them being noted? Sure the note taker may only be counting purple shirts or something benign... but the people being noted do you think they like it?