Sunday, November 6th 2016
NVIDIA Telemetry Spooks Privacy-sensitive Users, How to Disable it
Over the past few versions of NVIDIA GeForce drivers, the company has been bundling a telemetry tool that is enabled by default, auto-runs on Windows startup by default, and doesn't appear in the list of things you can choose not to install, when doing a custom-installation with NVIDIA GeForce driver installers. Very little is known about this new Telemetry component. For all we know, it could be a means for NVIDIA to collect crash-reports that help it improve its drivers down the line. Not everyone is convinced with this explanation.
Spanning across three separate startup tasks (a bit much for a crash reporter?), Telemetry is allegedly a means for NVIDIA to send data "back and forth." Users that are the privacy equivalent of germ-freaks might see this as a means for NVIDIA to spy on its users, for a plethora of data, such as usage patterns, etc. MajorGeeks posted a brief tutorial on how to disable Telemetry (and other bloatware included in NVIDIA drivers), using Sysinternals, but you can use Task Manager, msconfig, or Registry Editor to disable these as well.
Spanning across three separate startup tasks (a bit much for a crash reporter?), Telemetry is allegedly a means for NVIDIA to send data "back and forth." Users that are the privacy equivalent of germ-freaks might see this as a means for NVIDIA to spy on its users, for a plethora of data, such as usage patterns, etc. MajorGeeks posted a brief tutorial on how to disable Telemetry (and other bloatware included in NVIDIA drivers), using Sysinternals, but you can use Task Manager, msconfig, or Registry Editor to disable these as well.