It would be useful, it would not be ok.

It's still an invasion of privacy, and Intel has no business knowing I play (and how much), e.g., a gay dating simulator, Postal, Hogwarts Legacy, or any number of other games that either are or will be controversial, incriminating, or just useful as another data point in a personality profile.

So many of the devil's advocate posts justify it by explaining how spying on users can be useful. But the complaint isn't that it's "not useful"!

Exactly, this information being harvested can 100% be used against you.

For example, Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, attempted to secure a list of every Texan who changed their gender within the past 24 months, stating they may need drivers license numbers in the future to look up their information. The only reason that didn't happen is because the Department of Public Safety said they couldn't accurately produce that information.

Just imagine a state, or a foreign government subpoenaing or hacking Nvidia to get this information they're collecting. Now that state or foreign government doesn't just have your browser history like if they subpoenaed your ISP. They have everything you did on that computer. What's on your hard drive, what games you played, what devices are connected to your computer, etc.

I try to not go down the slippery slope analogies, but a company having this treasure trove of information on 82% of desktop users is going to make it ripe for hacking and state-sanctioned spying.

You have to understand that national security letters (NSLs) are the tip of the spear here. If the target of surveillance is sufficiently bad or scary, the government has tools and absolutely will use them to get this information. Once that is normalized, and companies literally build platforms to service those requests, then that capability gets pushed down to federal investigators, then local law enforcement.

To be fair, websites can also contain games and other stuff that might use a GPU.

Hardware accelerated video decoding for Youtube, Twitch, etc. for a very mundane example.

I don't think Intel needs telemetry to know their customers use Youtube and Twitch.

A tiny scrappy startup like Intel definitely needs to prioritise between YouTube and Twitch optimisation, and the best way to get that information is by spying on everyone, all the time.

I get playing devil's advocate, but come on...

It’s easy enough to slap a top 500 list as your benchmark but their size is why they should be aiming higher than that.

the category of a website (out of 30 possible categories??) seems orthogonal to whether or not it had embedded video or webgl, which should be pretty trivial to detect from GPU activity without knowing anything about the contents of the page that contains it.

Plus which video formats and resolutions are being used.