Do you have Spotify installed on your desktop? It's known to phone home meta data about your local collection of mp3s. Is playing music considered "utility" or "nosey" to you? I don't want to go into details about this particular example, the root problem is that you don't know, and that anything, even a utility program, could be nosey.

Correct. I don't have such app but I do have skype which I am looking at with increasing defiance.

But social network or advertising apps are unwelcome on a desktop, and in fact are usually referred to as malware when outside of a browser. I don't have much software on my desktop which isn't either a license I paid for or open source software.