Intel for example (a hardware company!) has multiple telemetry tools force-installed with their drivers that spend > 10 minutes(!!) of CPU time daily on my laptop. I have to go and use NTFS ACLs to block execute permissions on those things because it "repairs" itself more aggressively than Bonzi Buddy. NVIDIA injects their telemetry into third-party processes, so about 20% of the startup time of the built-in Calculator App is NVIDIA telemetry. It's not a game! It just happens to use DirectX for graphing... so NVIDIA has to know about it. Etc...

Any more info on this? I now want to start looking into blocking these myself.

Thanks for the well written and informative post, I enjoyed reading it!