https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqLI1xKc-L4
This is why autists are fantastic, been curious about this for awhile and yeah, any of us who give a shit about the state of games should not be installing modern multiplayer games at all at this rate. I would not be shocked if even Valve get desperate about the cheaters in their games and they go all in on anti-cheat spyware. Alternatively they may end up officially partnering with face-it.
TLDR: It's worth than anyone thinks, this video gives context and detail.
Every chip, every processor nowadays have some obligatory backdoor thanks to NSA.
I would not be surprised, but was there a mandate or law that went into place that governs this? or do they just keep it on the DL.
Look up the Intel Management Engine and AMD Platform Security Processor and prepare to not be surprised. It's essentially another computer inside your computer that bypasses all security, with various vulnerabilities found in it over the years. If the government mandates anything, it's likely just to give themselves access.
There was also a defcon talk I saw a while back where a guy found hidden instructions in some x86 processors that allowed you to dump abitrary memory. Ostensibly for debugging, but they're there. On a modern chip, a lot of the instructions are handled by microcode - it's computers and software all they way down and there's no way to verify it.
Is there a vulnerability that lets me shut it off?
For AMD i'm not aware of such methods .
But for Intel there is the me_cleaner project but it seems to be dead(is a bunch of scripts that lets you modify the BIOS to remove ME/enable the ME killswitch bit, but it will require you to get an external programmer) but how effective it is depends on how new the CPU is.