NVIDIA Adds Telemetry to Latest Drivers; Here's How to Disable It

[Batu69]

It's been brought to our attention that nVIDIA now has telemetry included with its drivers. It also continues the bloat with nVIDIA Wireless Controller and ShadowPlay services, something many don't need.
 

First, let's go over what these are.

 

Telemetry is essentially considered spying by many as it is a way to send data back and forth. It's nowhere near that simple, but we'd like to know what it's doing in our video drivers when it's never been needed before.

 

nVIDIA Wireless Controller requires you have, you guessed it, a nVIDIA Wireless Controller.

ShadowPlay is a way to capture and record gameplay.

The easiest way to check for, and disable these is to download Microsoft Autoruns. Autoruns is portable, so no installation is needed. Download it and unzip Autoruns.zip into its own folder and double click Autoruns.exe or Autoruns64.exe.

Type nvidia in the filter box.

You will find Telemetry in the Task Scheduler section and the nVIDIA Wireless Controller, and ShadowPlay services further down under the registry entries.
Uncheck what you don't want, close and reboot. If you get an error, close the program and right click on Autoruns.exe or Autoruns64.exe and "Run as Administrator."

Here is an image showing you how to get it done:

 

 

Article source

[C.G.B. Spender]

Telemetry provides developer with diagnostic non-personally identifiable data regarding their product and it's performance in various environments, aggregate of which they use to improve future version. Things that sit in memory doing nothing because one does not use their functionality are not bloat, they're just part of the package. This isn't the 80's and noone has that little memory anymore that 100mb is gonna hurt.

 

This fearmongering and paranoia around telemetry needs to go away and people can stop crippling their systems by mucking around in regedit and such disabling stuff at random they "think" or "heard" or "read on internet" it hurts them. 

 

Less FOX news style description of features, more common sense approach is sorely needed in this age I feel.

 

Just my opinion anyway.

[Sylence]

1 hour ago, C.G.B. Spender said:

Telemetry provides developer with diagnostic non-personally identifiable data regarding their product and it's performance in various environments, aggregate of which they use to improve future version. Things that sit in memory doing nothing because one does not use their functionality are not bloat, they're just part of the package. This isn't the 80's and noone has that little memory anymore that 100mb is gonna hurt.

 

This fearmongering and paranoia around telemetry needs to go away and people can stop crippling their systems by mucking around in regedit and such disabling stuff at random they "think" or "heard" or "read on internet" it hurts them. 

 

Less FOX news style description of features, more common sense approach is sorely needed in this age I feel.

 

Just my opinion anyway.

 

if every driver or software and also your operation system use telemetry and each one of them use 100mb (more or less) of your RAM then you gonna need a couple more RAM modules on your motherboard than you already have.

 

 

 

 

[Pete 12]

If they test these updates severely first, before bringing it to everyone, they dont need telemetry at all..........

 

[tiliarou]

2 minutes ago, saeed_dc said:

 

if every driver or software and also your operation system use telemetry and each one of them use 100mb (more or less) of your RAM then you gonna need a couple more RAM modules on your motherboard than you already have.

 

 

 

 

That's true, however I have yet to find a program telemetry feature that uses 100mb of ram... Would be more like 10-20mb, and nowadays 8gig is standard so I wouldn't bother much about ram.

What is absolutely unacceptable is that this change is not well documented enough, not communictated enough to the users, and most of all, no option to disable telemtry in the option. I don't care if it doesn't contain personal info or if it helps the devs, it's my PC, my choice. If I don't want telemetry it shouldn't be installed in the first place and option should be both in the installer and GFE ! F*** you Nvidia for forcing this.

[Pete 12]

"  no option to disable telemetry in the option " ...............its simply to disable by dont allow it through your firewall !

[tiliarou]

2 minutes ago, Pete 12 said:

"  no option to disable telemetry in the option " ...............its simply to disable by dont allow it through your firewall !

Of course but it's not my point. My point is that it should be available to any user even if they don't know how to use a firewall... There are even laws for this in some countries even if the data collected doesn't identify a specific user.

[Sylence]

14 minutes ago, tiliarou said:

Of course but it's not my point. My point is that it should be available to any user even if they don't know how to use a firewall... There are even laws for this in some countries even if the data collected doesn't identify a specific user.

 

don't worry, maybe soon we gonna see "destroy Nvidia spying" too

 

 

[Pete 12]

Just use your common sense and your firewall..................

[vissha]

• How to locate these tasks in Tasks Scheduler manually? Couldn't locate with/without GeForce Experience.
• However, after removing GeForce Experience which removed most unwanted folders & telemetry folders, couldn't locate these folders too

\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\Update Core\NvProfileUpdater64.exe
\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\Update Core\NvTmMon.exe
\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\Update Core\NvTmRep.exe

• Also, some claim here that the telemetry is still active after removal of GeForce Experience. Is this true?
• Have anyone tried this Nvidia Update trick on the latest version drivers, 342.00 and other Quadro/GameReady Drivers released in October/November 2016? Some reported issues here and here.

[Petrovic]

Telemetry -- read tracking -- seems to be everywhere these days. Microsoft pushes it on Windows, and web and software companies use it as well.

 

While there is certainly some benefit to it on a larger scale, as it may enable these companies to identify broader issues, it is undesirable from a user perspective.

Part of that comes from the fact that companies fail to disclose what is being collected and how data is stored and handled once it leaves the user system.

 

In the case of Nvidia, Telemetry gets installed alongside the driver package. While you may -- and should -- customize the installation of the Nvidia driver so that only the bits that you require are installed, there is no option to disable the Telemetry components from being installed. These do get installed even if you only install the graphics driver itself in the custom installation dialog.

Disable Nvidia Telemetry tracking on Windows

 

Most users who use PCs with Nvidia video cards probably don't even know that they are tracked by the software. The Nvidia telemetry service runs in the background on user log on, and additionally once a day.

 

As is the case with these kind of tracking services, there is little information found on the data that it collects.

 

 

You can check the Windows Task Scheduler to list all third-party tasks that run on the system. To do so, tap on the Windows-key, type Task Scheduler, and select Task Scheduler from the list of results.

 

There you find listed a total of six Nvidia tasks of which three are Telemetry tasks:

• NvTmMon -- Nvidia Telemetry Monitor -- runs C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\Update Core\NvTmMon.exe
• NvTmRep -- Nvidia crash and Telemetry Reporter -- runs C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\Update Core\NvTmRep.exe
• NvTmRepOnLogon -- Nvidia Profile Updater -- runs C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\Update Core\NvTmRep.exe --logon

The three other Nvidia tasks you find there are:

• NvNodeLauncher -- NVIDIA NvNode Launcher -- C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\NvNode\nvnodejslauncher.exe
• NvProfileUpdaterDaily -- NVIDIA Profile Updater -- C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\Update Core\NvProfileUpdater64.exe
• NvProfileUpdaterOnLogon -- NVIDIA Profile Updater -- C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\Update Core\NvProfileUpdater64.exe

Disable Nvidia Telemetry

Disabling the Nvidia Telemetry tasks has no ill-effect on the system. The video card works exactly as before and you can use all of the features that it supports.

 

Simply right-click on one of the Nvidia Telemetry tasks in the Task Scheduler, and select the "disable" option from the context menu.

 

This blocks the tasks from being run. Repeat the process for the two remaining Telemetry tasks, and any other tasks that you spot there that you may not require.

Note: These tasks may be re-enabled when you update or Nvidia drivers (for instance after completely removing the drivers). It is suggested therefore to always check the Task Scheduler after Nvidia driver updates to make sure these tasks are not enabled again.

 

You can use third-party software like the excellent Autoruns as well to manage these telemetry tasks. Simply run the program and switch to the Scheduled Tasks tab when it opens to manage all tasks scheduled on the system. There you find listed the same Nvidia tasks which you can delete or disable. (via MajorGeeks)

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[Batu69]

Topic has been merged.