No, this is a misunderstanding of what a TPM is.

A TPM is a secure element inside your computer, similar to the chip running your credit and debit card. That's it. Without you using it (i.e. your OS or an application you installed asking it to do something), it's exactly as dangerous as a blank chip card in your house that you don't use and didn't open any account for.

If you don't want anybody to talk to it, don't install applications or OSes on your computer that do things you don't want. You have full control over that! Not running software that's not acting in your own best interests is generally good practice anyway, TPM or no TPM.

> [...] a small dedicated hardware element for signing fingerprints is all that's ever been required [...]

You might be happy to hear that that's exactly what a TPM is, then!

As you say, a TPM alone can't do much of anything and doesn't pose much of a threat. Of course expanding the acronym - Trusted Platform Module - is a bit of a giveaway. They were always fully intended to serve as the root of trust for much more nefarious things.

Conversely, DRM is alive and well on almost universally TPM-less devices.

By the way, all of your comments in this thread end up dead – I had to vouch for them to be able to answer. Not sure what’s up with that.

Because the immediate next step after locking devices down is profit extraction from users.

Do you think Apple would have been able to maintain their App Store margins absent device control?

There's simply too much incentive for abuse.

The only way I personally could see supporting them is if there were first a legislative requirement that trusted modules always be user-modifiable.