[eswat]

Maybe I haven’t looked hard enough, but I’m surprised this and the forced login for GeForce Experience didn’t make a bigger wave amongst gamers, who’ve historically been very vocal about questionable decisions that provide far more value to the business than to the gamers.

[lsmarigo]

historically been very vocal about questionable decisions that provide far more value to the business than to the gamers.

Maybe true historically - but in recent years publishers have figured out a formula to subvert criticism (review embargos, sponsored reviews, reddit astroturfing). There's no action after the complaining, it's all bark, they still buy the game, little bit of heat on reddit/twitter but then you still set sales records. See The Division, No Man's Sky.

[voltagex_]

The Division has had a major overhaul though - partially in response to the criticism.

[nobodyshere]

Well, I simply uninstalled the whole thing. Will download drivers manually now. Same for razer synapse. Anything that requires me to have an account for no obvious reason has no place on my system.

[simooooo]

I created an account named something like fuckyou just for making me sign up. Now they email me addressing me as "fuck you. Have you seen.." :/

[nobodyshere]

As an option I sometimes register an account with fake email like the one you can get from 10minutemail

[webkike]

Likewise. I originally downloaded GeForce experience when I was installing my drivers. When I noticed login was required I uninstalled and downloaded the drivers manually.

[frik]

Probably many experienced user do that. Same with Windows since XP. Yet the companies don't learn and use such biased telemetry data for statistics and decide based on them. I wonder if Office and Windows UI got worse and worse, because of reading to much into telemetry data? The WindowsVista devs wrre pretty open in their official blog about it back then. And remember how it tanked, and that was just a small thing compared to the big failure of Win8/10 UI. Such companies need a CEO or CTO who tests their products themself like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did, it worked fine as long the were the leader.

[maksimum]

A sample size of 1-10 C's isn't necessarily better than a sample size of 100ks of users who aren't intimately interested in their privacy. I think C's don't have the time to think about the multitude of possible workflows in their apps. On the other hand developers are so intimately familiar with their apps that they have a hard time "not knowing" what to do.

[nitrogen]

You raise a good point about telemetry/analytics being biased away from people who disable those things, which can lead to companies unknowingly alienating that market. Another commenter on HN recently mentioned that most of their sales come from people with Google Analytics blocked.

[swiley]

I think most of the people who care about this sort of thing don't play games much anymore or are just used to it. Most games do something similar now.

[frik]

I still use Win7, and usually deactivate analytics. I heard Win10 store fails big time - have you heard the story of the new "Call of Duty" game cannot be played in multiplayer together with non-Win10Store users - mind you the majority uses Steam. It's a sad trend. In general analytics are useful, but the should be opt-in. And usually a crash reporting would be enough, right? But they are all abusing it by sending too much private data, that's not okay, at all.

[lightedman]

"I heard Win10 store fails big time - have you heard the story of the new "Call of Duty" game cannot be played in multiplayer together with non-Win10Store users - mind you the majority uses Steam."

Man, that sounds like a breach of Magnusson-Moss, and anti-competitive at that.

[everyone]

Same. Hopefully by the time win 7 is not supported gaming on Linux will have total parity with windows.

[alkonaut]

I usually just download and install the latest driver with regular intervals. I don't choose to install/use GeForce Experience, and now that it requires login I certainly won't.

Why would I want to use this Exprience thing anyway? It's crapware, right?

As for telemetry - as long as software only sends reasonable things (feature usage etc) and uses reasonable bandwidth, I'm completely fine. I honestly don't even mind if programs do it without asking and I think all apps should have feature statistics telemetry to be able to cut (or make more discoverable) features no one uses.

[dsissitka]

> Why would I want to use this Exprience thing anyway? It's crapware, right?

I use it for NVIDIA Share. It's my understanding that GPU-based alternatives can't compete because NVIDIA won't give them access to NVFBC and NVIFR. The creator of RivaTuner goes into more detail here:

http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=4687310&postcount=61

http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=5294898&postcount=5

[alkonaut]

Is the share function that much better than the built in win10 one? I quite like that one but the video quality is so-so.

Might just try experience 2.x which is still around. I don't mind telemetry I do mind s mandatory Facebook login...

[shostack]

The problem is you'll never fully know what info they collect and send, and who might have access to it.

It is equivalent to installing spyware.

[alkonaut]

If a program isn't evil, then it does only things that shouldn't require permission. Example: include the OS version and RAM amount in the http request to the upgrade server that is done on every startup.

Any info ever collected by no-permissions-asked telemetry must be such that it doesn't matter who has the information or what they do with it. If it isn't information of that kind then of course a program should ask permission. But that in my view isn't "telemetry" then. If it collects anything even remotely user-identifying or personal then it's in my definition not telemetry and should never be done without permission (if at all).

If a program really is malicious, then it doesn't matter if it asks for permission because why would that wouldn't respect the users wish anyway?

My argument wasn't pro/against telemetry, it was that asking permission doesn't change anything. Permission isn't what tells malicious programs from others. A benign program doesn't do things that needs permission to begin with.

[nitrogen]

One problem is that several seemingly innocuous pieces of data can be combined to create a unique ID. See the Panopticlick for an example.

[alkonaut]

Yeah, if someone e.g. gets my complete hw fingerprint, I'm identifiable. But it's no worse than I'm already uniquely id'd by visiting pretty much any website today. I don't like it, but I also don't see a point in being outraged when my music player does it but not when my favorite website does it.

[EasyTiger_]

You seem very willing to just dish your data over to everyone - can I install some software on your computer, too?

[voltagex_]

Is anyone going to packet capture it and find out?

[rasz_pl]

gamers vocal? they are sheep, they accepted mouse drivers calling home to the mothership before (only complain was a bug causing mouse jerkiness when connection goes offline).

[drdaeman]

It's probably off-topic but I'm still curious... Which vendor's drivers that was?

[oridecon]

Razer (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/why-the-hell-does-thi...)

I know Logitech's software also makes network calls but I never bothered looking what it is, I just block everything. At least it doesn't ask for a login, it can save locally or in the on-board memory.