How To Disable NVIDIA’s ‘Spying’ Service In Its Latest Drivers

Remember how there was a huge uproar when it was revealed that Windows 10 had telemetry services that automatically sent information back to Microsoft on how users were interacting with the operating system? It seems that graphics card maker NVIDIA has now added telemetry into its latest drivers. If you don’t want to be tracked by NVIDIA, here’s a way to disable it.

For those who have downloaded the latest driver packages from NVIDIA, you may have noticed that if you’ve installed GeForce Experience, the desktop client that controls the graphics card settings, you now have a few additional telemetry processes running on your machine.

Some people consider telemetry as spying since it automatically sends information about users’ computers back to vendors. Some of the information, such as crash reports, is useful for vendors to improve their products and services. But the lack of transparency in terms of what information is collected can be concerning to some users.

Reddit users have already pointed out that NVIDIA’s current privacy policy does say that the company “may collect ‘Personal information’, which is any information that can be used to identify a particular individual which can include traditional identifiers such as name, address, e-mail address, telephone number and non-traditional identifiers such as unique device identifiers and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.”

It’s not known exactly what kind of information the new telemetry services are collecting. We’ve reached out to NVIDIA for comment and here’s the response from a company spokesperson:

“GeForce Experience collects data to improve the application experience; this includes crash and bug reports as well as system information needed to deliver the correct drivers and optimal settings. NVIDIA does not share any personally identifiable information collected by GeForce Experience outside the company. NVIDIA may share aggregate-level data with select partners, but does not share user-level data. The nature of the information collected has remained consistent since the introduction of GeForce Experience 1.0. The change with GeForce Experience 3.0 is that this error reporting and data collection is now being done in real-time.”

If you really want to disable the telemetry, Major Geeks has provided some instructions on how to do so:

• Download Microsoft Autoruns, which shows you which programs are set to run during login or system bootup. Unzip it and run it.
• Type ‘nvidia’ in the filter box. The telemetry processes will be listed under the “Task Scheduler” section. Their names will include “Nv Tm“. For example, one of them is called “Nv TmMon_”. Uncheck those boxes.
• Close Autoruns and reboot your PC.

You can find more detailed instructions over at Major Geeks.

[Reddit]