Not 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.

That’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.

> a small-scale research effort.

Like the Computing Improvement Program, hosted on an obscure web page and systray menu?

Typically research is voluntary and involves getting informed consent from involved parties.

Is 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.

Ya, 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.

Yeah; why not just buy that data from Microsoft? :3

Right, because if you are using your computer mostly to download stuff, you are OK if your GPU occasionally hangs.

It 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.

If you have 80% of the desktop market, you can just aggregate web traffic statistics - your customers will be a representative sample

Every organization has constraints and in Intel's case they are constrained to only $70 billion in revenue.

That sounds like a finite number to me.

In 2018, Intel spent $15B on share repurchases and dividend issuances... if more cash could improve their offerings, they aren’t acting like it.

Over 20%. Is there a P/E ratio-analogue, but for this kind of dead weight financialization?

Is 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?

Usage 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.

But 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.

These goals blur together. R&D effort, and usage of die area are all justified by market potential. Knowing how large the market for a technology or tradeoff actually is has value.

> I'd hope this could be measured without collecting a ton of personal data.

Intel's claim is that they don't: "we would like your permission to collect [...] The categories of websites you visit, but not the URL itself" also the privacy safeguarding statement at the top of the page.

The whole purpose of CIP is to gather data on actual users' computing needs. For many computer users, the web is most of their computing experience -- it seems appropriate therefore to include usage of the web in the program.

Much like any customer experience study, privacy is an issue. Intel do at least claim to be mitigating the impact to privacy.

I'm of the opinion they should add FPGAs to everything. Every chip now has an insane amount of die area dedicated to the northbridge or the L3 cache. Anything else turns the junk we buy into garbage the moment everyone switches to a new standard.

Aren’t FPGAs slower than ASICs though?

That depends a bit on whether you count the fabrication time for a new ASIC towards the application startup time when switching applications or not.

Certainly propagation delay is higher. But for many applications it is cheaper to implement them in software than ASICs.

And besides, FPGAs are used for web scale applications, many of them applicable to small computers.

Edit: so they need to know every URL I access because they what to improve GPU or their drivers?

That's not what Intel is collecting. From the article:

> what data is collected and how is it used?

> The categories of websites you visit, but not the URL itself

> If I participate in the program, is there any personal information in the data collected?

> Will not include the URL (web address) for specific sites visited

Unless they're shipping a fairly complete domain -> category map to your machine and doing all categorization offline, unlikely, then they absolutely have the ability to collect it, and will "accidentally" do so at some point. We've all seen this movie now, multiple times.

edit: also the knee-jerk reaction most people are going to have to this, is concern about certain categories of websites.

Third party services (e.g. https://www.webshrinker.com/apis/) exist to perform this kind of classification. They'll be doing the classification API calls from the client (CIP-enrolled) machine, then sending the results (and not the domains or URLs that generated them) back to their own endpoint.

Then webshrinker would know everything you visit right ?

> The information collected includes categorized web browsing history that shows how long and how often you visited specific categories of sites (i.e. social media, personal finance, or news). All site visits are classified into one of 30 categories. We do not collect URLs, web pages titles, or user-specific content without explicit permission from you.

From a technical perspective, how does this work? I can only think of two ways:

(1) Intel downloads a big "map" file containing a huge list of pre-defined domains and categories. This means either the categories are pretty slim or you have a GB's big file

(2) Each URL is sent to Intel (aka "collected"). Maybe they don't "store" it ("We promise") but as soon as it leaves your system you have no control on this

They could use a technique like Google Safe Browsing where you send a partial hash of the url, and they send back the subset of the map containing only urls which could match that hash

They can strip the request down to the domain name, hash that with a OTP to do a fuzzy lookup on their end which would be difficult (not impossible) to reverse per reference, but would require APT to do en masse.

There is probably some flaw with this method... curious if others think there's a "safe enough" way to do something like this...

Yes they can, but they can not

Yes

And intel want it for free

No 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).

Exactly. 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.

And I should include my private data in this collection because why? I'm not getting paid for it.

You should turn it off; others won't, and their sacrifice will help Intel design products for real world usage.

Yes but they might be people you love and care about

Thy could do that with histograms of GPU load and network load. And that would be far less worrying or abusable.

Ask to the providers, not the customers.

Then they can pay to do focus groups, case studies, research and surveys instead of violating the privacy of their users.

That 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.

I 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.

Why is Netflix selling my data better than Intel collecting it directly?

Because 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.

It seems like you could buy this data anonymously from ISP or the Cloudflares of the world without infringing on privacy.

Intel has thousands of employees. They could spy on them and not on external users.

Also not OK!

How is your isp spying on you not infringing on privacy?

Sorry, 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.

They know what servers are accessed from their network by design. They don't need to spy and to give data on an individual level.

Yeah 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.

Yes 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.

Because it would be totally anonymous! Trust them!

Cloudflare doesn't sell, barter, exchange, etc. data about web browsing. No clue where you get that idea from.

GP says "Cloudflares of the world", i.e. companies providing similar services. We can take your word when it comes to Cloudflare itself, but that doesn't mean your competitors don't sell, barter or exchange data - and frankly, at this point, just possessing this data is grounds for reasonable suspicion. At least it seems to me that whatever value or code of behavior can be broken for profit will get broken by someone eventually.

(And even as we trust Cloudflare of 2019 doesn't do it, who's to say Cloudflare of 2021 will still live by this code? Can you guarantee that? I often find myself wishing for an established way for a company to make legally enforceable vows about its behavior. Maybe there is something like this already?)

Suprisingly recently, I learned that cloudflare does hand over data about browsing and also inspects the data that is being exchanged by the user and the web site - and pro-actively hands the data to various gov agencies.

I do not think most webmasters or web surfers know this.

see "Among other things, that resulted in us cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network and notifying law enforcement when there was content" - and more, via: https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/

Maybe 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.

Intel 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.