First, let me say that I think what they did was wrong and it should only be opt-in and clearly stated.<p>That said, having managed fleets of machines that were nominally running the "same" software, getting updates from all of them is a <i>really</i> powerful debugging tool. Once you get above about 1,000 machines logs comparison of all the machines immediately surfaces software issues (happens on all machines), connectivity issues (machines in a certain area), bad machines (unique problem signature), and environmental issues (time of day correlation with other things like power/temp/humidity/etc).<p>And <i>that</i> gives you a bit more courage to release things early because you'll see problems faster and can fix them.<p>So with a typical roll-out of 10% of the population followed by an additional 15% followed by the rest, you can catch a lot of errors and 75% of your population sees a really good experience (and in web services where 66% of the populations the minimum requirement for delivering rated service you can often get close to 100% uptime).<p>Does that justify their action? No. But since you really don't need <i>everybody</i> to participate to get the benefit I could see a path where you opt in for early access to drivers which requires the telmetry, and people who are ok waiting for the driver to be clean in the 'canary' population get a driver without telemetry.
On a related note; I can't even use NVidia's "Geforce Experience" any more without logging in. Thanks for that, NVidia. Just what I wanted; a driver tool that forces me to log in.
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.
Good. Telemetry should have been in these video drivers for crash reporting for a decade. Would have helped a ton with various video game crashs and the low quality of video drivers.
Send an email to info@nvidia.com to let them know that you'd like them to change their policies regarding opt-in vs opt-out default settings.<p>--<p>Here is my email:<p>Dear Nvidia,<p><pre><code> I have been a life-long supporter since I was in college (14 years). I have recommended your products to many friends and purchased more than 15 of your graphics cards for my own computers. I build servers and run a cloud storage business. My friends and family look to me for advice on their own purchases. I am your target market - a technology leader that makes recommendations to others.
I have been extremely satisfied with your product for a long time and would like to be able to recommend your "issue-free" products to my friends, family, and associates. I'm a big fan of Nvidia.
</code></pre>
--<p><pre><code> Unfortunately, you have recently enabled telemetry reports (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884762), and I will be less willing to recommend your product, opting for an AMD solution, or on-board solutions.
</code></pre>
--<p><pre><code> To resolve this issue, please:
</code></pre>
1: Please use opt-in defaults instead of opt-out defaults for privacy-sensitive reports<p>2: Make a blog post publishing your public policy on prioritizing user privacy over other priorities.<p>--<p>On a more general note, privacy issues will be an increasingly important consideration for technology leaders before making recommendations. Microsoft made a mistake integrating privacy-invasive telemetry into Windows 10. Please don't make the same mistake. Nvidia needs leaders that will prioritize user privacy over other market concerns.<p>Thank you,<p>David
As a long time Nvidia user, I grew tired of Nvidia not releasing open drivers. At the same time, amdgpu + radeonsi + radv are constantly improving, so my next GPU is going to be AMD Vega.
The article tries to get you to download "autoruns.zip" from their site. That's suspicious. But it seems to be OK. The official Microsoft version is at [1] and the ZIP files compare equal.<p>[1] <a href="https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.as...</a>
If I find any software defaulting to opt me in, without asking, it gets turned off and stays off. If it asks, I almost always permit it. When I have customers ask me about the same (when prompted by their software) they tend to agree with my thinking.<p>There is an exception though - since Windows 10's enforced telemetry, I have turned off all of the telemetry for all of their software across the board. Until they start to conduct themselves respectably again, they can do without my drop in their ocean.
In NVIDIA's defense... this is all optional.
You can still install the drivers with control panel without any telemetry or "GeForce Experience".
I recently just switch to AMD because I bought a FreeSync monitor and I've been meaning to upgrade my card anyway. Looks like I did it just in the nick of time.
I just switched to a geforce 8400gs using the nouveau drivers on GNU/Linux. I'm not big into graphically intense applications and I don't have to worry about my graphics card waking up and "phoning home." :)
Imagine that five years from now, RISC-V or POWER8 have become established as free core-CPU platforms. Is there anything equivalent coming through in the GPU space?
Even if we outlaw phone-home for information-gathering, automatic updates <i>have to</i> upload information about your architecture in order to download binaries.<p>I don't think anybody is suggesting at this point we ditch automatic updates -- the consensus seems to be they fix more problems than they cause. So this is going to remain a problem.
I'm not bothered about the privacy so much as the bloat (or rather - I trust that those more vigilant than me will warn me if the privacy issues are more than theoretical - lazy I know).<p>The bloat is endemic to hardware companies. Is there some law of nature that says if you primarily build peripherals then you write terrible software?
What we actually need is good _independant_ firewall vendors.<p>It is not enough to focus on the telemetry giant corporations like NVIDIA or Microsoft while forgetting about all the P2P software being installed by game's vendors and "telemetry" of software smaller vendors.<p>On big computers/pcs the default mode makes the user give up too much control _forever_ once the software its has been installed. Most software only need to be doing anything when your actually using it.<p>What we need is not opt-in checkboxes from vendors, what we need is the operating-system level software to be better -> where our explicit permission is needed to "allow" some kind of activity like transmitting over the network or detecting my location.
I used to just use the Windows "Update driver" dialog to manually find nvlddmkm.sys and install it that way to avoid the bloat. I haven't used Windows in a while but it may still be possible.
What's "GeForce Experience", "Wireless Controller" and "ShadowPlay services"?<p>Do recent drivers always include the latter? How do I check for them? Are they kernel modules?<p>In my case, all the nvidia drivers I see loaded are:<p><pre><code> $ lsmod | grep nv
nvidia_drm 20480 1
drm 294912 3 nvidia_drm
nvidia_uvm 704512 0
nvidia_modeset 770048 3 nvidia_drm
nvidia 11866112 42 nvidia_modeset,nvidia_uvm</code></pre>
Ever since AMD put in the effort into open source Linux drivers, I've been only buying Radeon GPUs. This is a reminder of why I don't want to rely on proprietary drivers.
Can it be avoided using the "advanced" option in the setup wizard and deselect everything but the graphics driver (,the physics engine and the sound driver)?
I'm surprised by the backlash against telemetry on HN. How else are you supposed to improve reliability of software used on tens of millions of devices with an ear infinite number of hardware and software permutations?