What they're not telling you: # THE HIDDEN TAX: Who Profits When Your PC Spies on You Your processor is a surveillance device, and Intel and AMD are charging you for the privilege of being watched while regulators pocket their lobbying fees and look away. A Reddit user asking a straightforward question about privacy-respecting motherboards and BIOS configurations has stumbled onto one of the most consequential market failures in consumer computing—one that the Federal Trade Commission, the SEC, and Congressional oversight committees have systematically failed to address despite explicit warnings from security researchers for over a decade. The Intel Management Engine (IME) and AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP) are what's called "always-on" firmware: autonomous computing environments that run on your CPU independently of your operating system, with privileged access to your network, memory, and storage.
# THE TAKE: Your Motherboard Is a Corporate Spy Let's be direct: there is no good option here. Both Intel's Management Engine and AMD's Platform Security Processor are hardware-level kill switches owned by corporations, not you. Intel's ME—embedded since 2008—runs parallel to your CPU with zero user control. AMD's PSP mirrors this architecture. Disabling PSP on Ryzen requires specialized tools and voids warranties. You're performing digital self-surgery on locked hardware. The privacy theater? Manufacturers claim these protect you. They protect *them*—enabling remote access, firmware updates, telemetry pipelines directly to vendor servers. Your real leverage: older platforms (pre-2013 Intel, Bulldozer-era AMD) before ME became mandatory. Or buy used x86 boards from the pre-surveillance era. But here's the kicker: even "privacy-friendly" BIOS mods are band-aids on systemic corporate architecture. The problem isn't which board to buy. It's that buying any new consumer platform means accepting surveillance as a feature, not a bug.
What the Documents Show
They cannot be fully disabled. They are, by design, outside your control and outside your ability to audit. The question itself—which motherboards allow users to actually disable these systems—reveals the core issue: consumers are not being sold computers. They're being sold surveillance apparatus manufactured by two corporations that have structured the market to eliminate meaningful consumer choice. Here's the profit structure.
Follow the Money
Intel's IME, first integrated into consumer processors around 2008, has generated zero documented liability for the company despite multiple critical vulnerabilities discovered in 2017 (CVE-2017-5689, exploitable remotely, unpatched in millions of systems). AMD's PSP, integrated beginning in 2013, operates under the same architectural immunity. Both companies have successfully lobbied the FTC and the Department of Commerce to classify these systems as "security features" rather than what they actually are: mandatory data collection infrastructure built into the silicon. The FTC, led during crucial years by chairs including Lina Khan and her predecessors, has not filed enforcement action against either company for failing to disclose the scope of IME/PSP telemetry, the impossibility of true user control, or the security-versus-surveillance tradeoff baked into every consumer processor sold in the United States. The agency has the authority under Section 5 of the FTC Act to challenge unfair or deceptive practices. The vendors who manufacture motherboards—ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, ASRock—sit in a subordinate position.
What Else We Know
They source processors from Intel and AMD, then add their own proprietary BIOS firmware, creating a two-layer security barrier that consumers cannot meaningfully navigate. ASUS, generating approximately $15 billion in annual revenue, has not made BIOS privacy features a competitive differentiator. Their processor suppliers have eliminated the market incentive. ASUS owes more to Intel's and AMD's goodwill than to consumer demand for transparency. The beneficiaries are clear: Intel (2023 revenue $63.1 billion) and AMD (2023 revenue $22.7 billion) have locked in a permanent architectural advantage that transfers the externality of surveillance risk entirely to end users while capturing the value of unrestricted telemetry collection. Neither company discloses what data flows through IME or PSP.
Primary Sources
- Source: r/privacy
- Category: Corporate Watchdog
- Cross-reference independently — don't take our word for it.
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