It was not a secret, but it certainly caused an uproar, which prompted Bethesda to scale it back dramatically. Being in ring-0, it has access to all contents on

It was not a secret, but it certainly caused an uproar, which prompted Bethesda to scale it back dramatically. Being in ring-0, it has access to all contents on disk, and all contents in memory. What is actually sent up to Bethesda's servers could be, quite literally, anything on your system. It's why Sony's rootkit DRM (got it right this time) was so poorly received a decade and a half ago - because you, as the computer's owner, can't control what it does or isolate its access.