The French hardware magazine CanardPC recently reported that Nvidia drivers from 368.25 and later will send various data to Nvidia servers over HTTP without encryption.
Among that data are things like your screen size, CPU information and SSD model reference. If you have installed GeForce Experience with the default options, more information will be sent, including your brand and model of the motherboard, serial number, BIOS version, mounted media devices like USB drives, and more. Even worse, it will also send information about the software you are using on your computer including for how long you are using it and various other statistical data. In other words, it communicates information that is unique to your system so that you are easily trackable. You can find a list of what data is sent from a test system set up by CanardPC here.
Even if you assume that Nvidia is only using this data for troubleshooting possible problems with their graphics drivers, the fact remains that all this data is being sent in plain text and therefore can be easily intercepted.
To protect our users against this privacy breach, we added the tracking domains to our TrackStop filter (in the “Ads” category). Specifically we added the following domains:
gfswl.geforce.com telemetry.nvidia.com gfe.nvidia.com
This should not interfere with the normal Nvidia site, so you still should be able to access content (like latest drivers from there).
If you’re not using Perfect Privacy and still want to block this data from being sent, you can either block the domains in the Windows Firewall or follow the instructions in this article.