[white-flame]

This isn't about just technical issue monitoring. Their privacy policies and such include sharing your personally identifying information (email, full name, etc) with 3rd parties & advertisers, and associating your random web browsing with your video card's account.

Remember that it's not just games, but your web browser, media players and anything that might use hardware acceleration runs through these drivers, which then reports back to nVidia. Plus, all telemetry data is unencrypted during transmission.

On the plus side, it looks like this is only transmitted back to the mothership if you're running GeForce Experience, which I don't think is even available on Linux.

[ChuckMcM]

In my experience it is more nuanced than that, engineering will add a feature or capability and someone will come along and find a use for it that was unintended. At the search engine where I worked we came up with ways to inspect and adjust host rank and page rank such that we could knock out bad sites from the search results that were doing a good job gaming the system. But that biz dev folks also noted the same pieces could be combined to favor someone who advertised with us over someone who didn't.

The engineering feature is designed with pure intentions, keep crap out of the results stream, but the mechanism is amoral. If you're executive team wants to exploit it for more money so that the company does better financially, your options are limited as an engineer.

[white-flame]

At a data design level, they could (and should, by default) at the very least keep all grossly personally identifying information out of the data collected. That's just simply responsible engineering in the modern era.

They could have implemented telemetry without requiring you to link your graphics card to your email or Facebook account, as GeForce Experience never required that in the past and still worked fine.

This isn't execs using innocuous data that the good engineers simply happened to have. This is new and specific personal data collection and association of information that they have no business collecting, except for the sole purpose of invading their users' privacy for side profits.

[ChuckMcM]

I'm not disagreeing, I'm just saying it is hard to build tools and features into your project that your own business development team can't abuse.