Has the situation changed since then? I mean, there's a reason why e.g. Nvidia drivers know and care about what games you have installed. I can also imagine quite a bit of rationale behind this, from a positive aspect - paying some knowledgeable people to extensively tweak settings by hand for popular games, and then having these settings become part of the driver seems somewhat reasonable. The above example on the other hand, probably was done for nefarious purposes. But how would we know from the outside, when it seems to have become standard practice, and for good reason?