NVIDIA drivers phone back home but no one knows why

Posted on Monday, November 07 2016 @ 14:00 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck

A hot story making the rounds today is the discovery of a telemetry service in the latest NVIDIA GeForce drivers. This service auto-runs on Windows boot by default and there's no opt-out in the NVIDIA driver installation menu.

Microsoft got a lot of flack for the telemetry features in Windows 10 and now NVIDIA has some explaining to do about the purpose of this undocumented process. At the moment, there's not a lot of certainty about the goal of this telemetry service, it seems to capture data on an hourly basis and once a day it transmits a report to what is believed to be a NVIDIA server. Some believe it's little more than a crash report monitor, hopefully NVIDIA will clarify the situation soon.

In the meantime, if you want to disable the NVIDIA GeForce telemetry service you can do this by running the Microsoft Autoruns tool, a guide can be found at Majorgeeks. Specifically, you need to disable "NvTmMon", "NvTmRep" and "NvTmRepOnLogon".

NVIDIA telemetry

About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.

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