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?
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.
> 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.