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Why on earth would the "category of web sites" be of possible use other than selling the data? Telemetry is now an attack vector for privacy in general because
by rswail 7y ago
Why on earth would the "category of web sites" be of possible use other than selling the data?
Telemetry is now an attack vector for privacy in general because no one can be trusted with the data.
- SamuelAdams 7y agoNot trying to defend intel, just trying to offer a (somewhat justified) answer: If people are using more streaming services, that means Intel should focus more on their Integrated Graphics platforms. If people are downloading significantly more data than ever before, they should probably make sure their networking drivers receive more support. Knowing how people use their PC's, even by category, can help Intel manage its driver development.
- sizzzzlerz 7y agoAnd I should include my private data in this collection because why? I'm not getting paid for it.
- gnode 7y agoYou should turn it off; others won't, and their sacrifice will help Intel design products for real world usage.
- used74919 7y agoYes but they might be people you love and care about
- sizzzzlerz 7y agoIt's funny because you really believe that.
- mixedbit 7y agoRight, because if you are using your computer mostly to download stuff, you are OK if your GPU occasionally hangs.
- SamuelAdams 7y agoIt doesn't have to be that bad. Every organization has constraints - particularly people's time. If Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu come up with some new video codec and plan on releasing it in 12 months into their services, and I know 80% of my consumers use video streaming services, then I know that I should allocate most of my development resources / people towards enabling the new codec on GPU's my company sells. Knowing how people use your products helps allocate new development features. This problem isn't unique to intel.
- mistermann 7y agoIs this codec scenario plausible, that something so significant would be broadly adopted and Intel would need user usage data to decide whether to support it?
- gnode 7y agoUsage data could be very useful for decisions on what to dedicate die area to, and how to price products. They might find that a market segment doesn't do a lot of playing 3D games, but does spend a lot of time watching Youtube on battery, and so make the decision to drop integrated GPU shader cores and dedicate more die area to video decoding, to make energy efficiency better when watching video.
- Faark 7y agoBut now we are not speculating about potential new additions, we want to know utilization of existing circuits to allocate resources & improve in the future. I'd hope this could be measured without collecting a ton of personal data.
- tomcooks 7y agoAsk to the providers, not the customers.
- joshspankit 7y agoNo server-supplied metadata is trustworthy enough to base your business decisions on. If 80% of the internet traffic was illegal server-based video streaming, those providers would simply be changing the metadata every time they got “profiled”. Some probly even do it proactively. Intel would be much better off to focus on what the cpu is asked to do (decode 4:4:4 h265 and/or aggressively tune for low latency, for example).
- adavis321 7y agoExactly. Why do they need to know categories of websites? They should be collecting the things your computer is doing from a technical standpoint. Then I could be convinced that they were trying to learn how to improve their products from an engineering perspective. As it stands CIP looks like a way to use the large installed base of their products to improve the marketing/partnership side of their business.
- Dylan16807 7y agoThy could do that with histograms of GPU load and network load. And that would be far less worrying or abusable.
- jiofih 7y agoThat’s a very poor excuse for mass collection of personal data. They can easily figure that out from commercial datasets, or even a small-scale research effort.
- gowld 7y ago> a small-scale research effort. Like the Computing Improvement Program, hosted on an obscure web page and systray menu?
- heavyset_go 7y agoTypically research is voluntary and involves getting informed consent from involved parties.
- hcs 7y agoIs this not voluntary? > Q: How do I participate in the Intel® Computing Improvement Program? > A: When you download and install the Intel® Computing Improvement Program, click Accept on the invitation to join.
- piracy1 7y agoYa, I think the key bit of spook that can be derived from the title is that they're using the CPUs to do this, maybe like they're baking it into Intel ME. That's what I first thought until I read the article. It's just intel saying, hey come install our spyware. However it's worth nothing that I bet this will come preinstalled on a ton of devices which is in fact spooky.
- shrimp_emoji 7y agoYeah; why not just buy that data from Microsoft? :3
- disintegore 7y agoI don't think this is even "somewhat" justified. The legitimate way to acquire this information would be to purchase it from partners who have a legitimate reason to collect it. If you want to know how popular 4K streaming is, for instance, Netflix, Twitch (etc) can provide that information. My uninformed guess is that the information would be far less costly and of far better quality than using some large-scale spyware deployment instead. Unless there's something more that can make it worth Intel's while.
- gowld 7y agoWhy is Netflix selling my data better than Intel collecting it directly?
- disintegore 7y agoBecause collecting data about streaming service usage makes sense when you operate a streaming service. I don't see anything inherently wrong with it so long as the information is anonymous.
- SerLava 7y agoThat is a very, very broad piece of data that could just as easily be found with a simple survey or by buying the flat statistics from ISPs.
- heavyset_go 7y agoThen they can pay to do focus groups, case studies, research and surveys instead of violating the privacy of their users.
- nerdponx 7y agoMaybe it could have to do with different kinds of CPU workloads imparted by different mixes of HTML, CSS, and Javascript functionality. After all web browser performance is a common complaint. But realistically it's just for advertising.
- olliej 7y agoIntel has cared a lot about things like JS performance so may want to directly observe what js is being run. I recall that being a big challenge when I worked on browsers - it’s very difficult to see what users actually encounter beyond “top X website” lists, which are of questionable value.
- snarf21 7y agoIt seems like you could buy this data anonymously from ISP or the Cloudflares of the world without infringing on privacy.
- hosteur 7y agoHow is your isp spying on you not infringing on privacy?
- jraph 7y agoThey know what servers are accessed from their network by design. They don't need to spy and to give data on an individual level.
- penagwin 7y agoYeah the word "spy" might be debatable but it's certainly something like "snooping". Just because they process the data doesn't mean they need to record it. I feel like a good analogy here is the ISP is your secretary. Sure they must have access to your documents to do their job, but if they're reading through your stuff for "gossip" or snapping photos of your documents, that'd still be an invasion of privacy.
- jraph 7y agoYes but ISPs are huge and can limit logging to outbound connections. No individual recording would be done. Privacy is kept -- with a big caveat that deanonymisation of aggregated data is possible in a number of cases, of course, granted.
- jaywalk 7y agoBecause it would be totally anonymous! Trust them!
- snarf21 7y agoSorry, my response was a little short. I should have said that people like your ISP and cloud hosting are/can already spying on us. If Intel wanted this data solely for the purposes of improving drivers, they could buy it from internet connectivity companies. We don't also need them tracking everything we do.