Oh Noes NVidia is spying on us!<sarcasm>

I’m posting this before anyone else does & it’s also been a shit day, where I’ve been rolling my face across my keyboard at the stupidity of people on FB, and then this issue started popping up at the wrong time for me to not bite.

If you don’t know what the issue is the short of it is: Reddit finally got hold of the fact that NVidia’s GeForce Experience (exactly like AMDs Gaming Evolved App & Crimson) takes user telemetry data from your PC that is personally identifiable and then sells it to whoever they want. This means if you have a GTX GPU Nvidia is selling your information willy-nilly to other corporate overlords! Once Reddit got involved a lot of bloggers & Youtubers got in on it and jumped the gun without DOING ANY FUCKING FACT CHECKING AT ALL!

There is so many things that are wrong with the information that it really is just mind numbing. I don’t support NVidia or AMD, I’m a member on both of their user forums because I use both of their hardware and I believe they both have strengths and major weaknesses.
One supremely annoying part is that the same news was “broken” by the “tech” reporter at Breitbart 2months ago, who made all the same errors & this reddit pile-on regurgitates them. My issue boils down to 5 points:

  1. NVidia doesn’t force anyone to do anything - you do not have to install the GeF Experience to still download drivers. All you miss out on is the automatic updates/alerts when a new driver releases, which are pointless, unless you are playing the latest game that the driver is for. You also miss out on NVidia’s Shadowplay/Share application - but that’s looking like it’s has its fair share of performance issues. You also miss out on the auto optimisation feature for your installed games - which in some cases is broken & in others actually overwrites your tried & true settings to the detriment of the game performance. If you know what you are doing in game you should be optimising it yourself as all the app does it work out what they have decided is the best settings NVidia chose for similar hardware to yours, it isn’t tailor made.

  2. You can choose to log on using your FB account or create a NVidia User account which I think asks for your name, email & maybe a birthday? The Bday is to allow you to be valid for competitions I believe.

  3. The Geforce Experience collates data from your PC because that’s how it decides how to optimise your games - and it is linked to your account, so if you linked to a transparent FB account they now have all that data available. This personal level data is only used internally by NVidia.

4)The data that NVidia “shares” with partners is at a group level, so statistics on number of people playing X game with what hardware etc. and is not personally identifiable. The cut&paste on reddit that everyone is referring to is from the NVidia site EULA not the for the application that everyone is coming at with burning pitchforks.

  1. Numbers 3 & 4 were spelled out in the FAQ on the Geforce Experience and available with a single click- something that a large majority of bloggers & tech sites couldn’t be arsed checking up on. It is literally in the FAQ for GFE & nobody bothered to check this before tweeting/blogging/erupting in outrage.

But you know there are some sites that actually bothered to ask questions & do research to & well done to GamersNexus for doing what I would like to call “their job”.

OK I will throw fuel on your fire. Everyone up in arms about this and Sgt_T8ie you know I despise big brother, BUT how many of these same folks who have complained about this own iPhones. Simply by have an iTunes account, you have provided and gave permission to so much more.

Today my work iPhone told me it would take 59 mins to get home. I know where I live and never had to enter my home address. How did the phone know. What info is being gather if the diagnostics were smart enough to determine it automatically.

Just saying.

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Trainsmash That’s the extra level of stupidity… it’s blowing up on social media. Where you leave a footprint & a trial.

Facebook is worse haha.

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I kinda like Gforce Experience.

I take the lazy way out and just let it tell me when there is a driver update available, rather than me having to keep a constant check on it. Sometimes I install it right away, sometimes I wait. But it gives me an easy way to keep current. The optimization thing is the only other part of it I really use. I usually configure games myself, but what I do is go and double check with what it recommends, and then decide if I want to turn specific things on and off. In some cases, it actually suggests things that I haven’t thought of, that help. In the Division, it actually helped tremendously; I couldn’t get the game to run without crashing, unless I used the specific settings that Experience told me, then it ran flawlessly. Helped me narrow down exactly which setting my card didn’t like.

I don’t run FB at all (or any other social media) on my gaming rig, so I just log in with my Nvidia account. I don’t really mind them getting the info that they are getting, you just have to live with that stuff these days, if you want to use a product.

Like has been said, FB, itunes, shopping sites, all those are worse, and people use them like crazy. One that gets me is NewEgg. I can go onto New Egg, and browse around, looking at computer stuff, basically the equivalent of window shopping, or browsing through a catalogue. Cause thats fun, ya know? Remember as a kid, before the internet, looking at toys in a Christmas catalogue? But when I get done, within the hour, I always get an email from them, advertising the things I had just looked at.

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Where was the outrage with Razer, Logitech or others doing the exact same thing … ?! :wink:

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MeFFFlenn don’t forget google & Microsoft … every damn company wants to know when you eat, shit, when you have a sex … and so on … for only one purpose, and that purpose is searching a new ways for selling some crappy product … for which they think is very important to you … Internet is becoming very nasty place and every day new company has a brain fart … called tracking user habits (in last 5 years that is tracking whole user life) …

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Mark2K77 Ah to obvious let´s drop a small nuke: AMD Team Red Membership … Or Giveaways on Raptr. In fact they are doing it all in one or the other way :wink:

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MeFFFlenn in any way, lately installation of any applications has become as proctology examination … you end up with anal probe in your OS xD … end every god damn idiot knows what are you doing in the vastness of the Internet and in every day of your life

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Don’t forget all of the tracking GX does! I mean, no…that doesn’t happen :wink:

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ShiftySatchmo thank you for reminding me :stuck_out_tongue: xD

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Polekatt said in Oh Noes NVidia is spying on us!<sarcasm>:

I kinda like Gforce Experience.

I take the lazy way out and just let it tell me when there is a driver update available, rather than me having to keep a constant check on it. Sometimes I install it right away, sometimes I wait. But it gives me an easy way to keep current. The optimization thing is the only other part of it I really use. I usually configure games myself, but what I do is go and double check with what it recommends, and then decide if I want to turn specific things on and off. In some cases, it actually suggests things that I haven’t thought of, that help. In the Division, it actually helped tremendously; I couldn’t get the game to run without crashing, unless I used the specific settings that Experience told me, then it ran flawlessly. Helped me narrow down exactly which setting my card didn’t like.

I don’t run FB at all (or any other social media) on my gaming rig, so I just log in with my Nvidia account. I don’t really mind them getting the info that they are getting, you just have to live with that stuff these days, if you want to use a product.

Like has been said, FB, itunes, shopping sites, all those are worse, and people use them like crazy. One that gets me is NewEgg. I can go onto New Egg, and browse around, looking at computer stuff, basically the equivalent of window shopping, or browsing through a catalogue. Cause thats fun, ya know? Remember as a kid, before the internet, looking at toys in a Christmas catalogue? But when I get done, within the hour, I always get an email from them, advertising the things I had just looked at.

But the thing is… you know what you’re doing & seem to understand that … in order to optimise your game sthey need to read telemetry from your computer.

You are using GFE to optimise first & then tweak. This is a very solid way of doing it, I’ve done the same. Just take care, there’s been times when the new update to GFE (not driver the actual application) will just swap out those tweaks without advising you. In my instance (I had been running it for the ShadowPlay feature) the optimisation broke on the update & it rescanned all my games & then declared that they could not be optimised. Leaving the game library screen covered in little grey warning triangles…

Yes as ShiftySatchmo says FB is way more invasive & the fact so many people are spreading it on FB using iPhones/Droids while posting to reddit using the same nickname as their Twitter/SnapChat & Instagram accounts is part of the reason I have keycaps indented in my forehead today.

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MeFFFlenn said in Oh Noes NVidia is spying on us!<sarcasm>:

Where was the outrage with Razer, Logitech or others doing the exact same thing … ?! :wink:

I know & at least the GFE wasn’t a horrible RAM hog like Synapse!

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ShiftySatchmo said in Oh Noes NVidia is spying on us!<sarcasm>:

Don’t forget all of the tracking GX does! I mean, no…that doesn’t happen :wink:

Oh I VPN through clone networks using back channels on the dark web when I post to GX… I’ve watched American crime shows, I know how easy it is to hack into the FBI. I’m cyber Haxor L337

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Polekatt said in Oh Noes NVidia is spying on us!<sarcasm>:

ptimization thing is t

Don’t get me started on the target marketing. For some reason I need a Russian wife or an Asian girlfriend. Don’t want to call it out like that, but those are the titles of the ads.

My wife is convinced I trawl porn on the media PC, the PC I taught my 5 year old son to use for Netflix and his DVD’s. I mean really.

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Mark2K77 said in Oh Noes NVidia is spying on us!<sarcasm>:

MeFFFlenn “don’t forget google & Microsoft … every damn company wants to know when you eat, shit, when you have a sex”

If you eat while pooping and having sex do all the companies break or send you personalized ads?

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Trainsmash said in Oh Noes NVidia is spying on us!<sarcasm>:

Polekatt said in Oh Noes NVidia is spying on us!<sarcasm>:

ptimization thing is t

Don’t get me started on the target marketing. For some reason I need a Russian wife or an Asian girlfriend. Don’t want to call it out like that, but those are the titles of the ads.

My wife is convinced I trawl porn on the media PC, the PC I taught my 5 year old son to use for Netflix and his DVD’s. I mean really.

haha - we call it “profiling”

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