NVIDIA’s Telemetry in GeForce Drivers


NVIDIA

Here is a topic related to NVIDIA that became hot this weekend. It’s about NVIDIA and telemetry functions added in their latest graphics drivers (starting from R368.25). According to MajorGeeks (the first article on this topic), the telemetry functions are related to the GeForce Experience (GFE) utility (GFE allows to keep your NVIDIA drivers up to date and optimize your games).

Gamers Nexus has monitored with Wireshark GFE transactions. The first conclusion is that NVIDIA does nothing special and does not collect personal data like name or email. GFE data collection essentially includes hardware-level information.

For me, the most interesting part in this story is not the data sent or not sent by NVIDIA driver, but simply the discovery of a tool called Autoruns and how you can use it, if you are a bit paranoiac, to disable NVIDIA telemetry. Autoruns is a tool developed by the author of Process Explorer. Autoruns shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login.

Here is what Autoruns shows me on my dev system with R375.70:


Microsoft Autoruns, NVIDIA telemetry functions

 
To disable NVIDIA’s telemetry, launch Autoruns (Autoruns.exe or Autoruns64.exe) with admin rights, filter entries with nvidia keyword (filter box), and uncheck all entries that start with NvTm:


Microsoft Autoruns, NVIDIA telemetry functions disabled

 
I never install GFE on my dev system when I install a new NV driver, and telemetry functions are there all the same. And what about this process: NVIDIA user experience driver component? Related to GFE?


NVIDIA user experience driver component in Windows processes

 
References and more links

 
NVIDIA, The Way It’s Meant to be Spied 😉

3 thoughts on “NVIDIA’s Telemetry in GeForce Drivers”

  1. WacKEDmaN

    lately, ive been extracting the driver package manually, then deleting all the bloatware folders, only keeping Display.Driver, HDAudio, and Physx..then install as normal..none of the crapware shows up!.. no regedit/taskscheduler/autoruns edits needed!

  2. Bastiats_Ghost

    Wow thank you so much WacKEDmaN that is a genius solution. It worked with the latest 8/14/2017 drivers too!

    All I had to do was extract the Nvidia drivers .exe with 7zip into a folder on my desktop. Then I deleted the nvTelemetry folder and installed the drivers normally without any telemetry garbage.

    So awesome. I never knew I could do that before. Thanks again!

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