PunkBuster overly zealous?

[Michael Nelson]

Maybe this is old hat, but sorry, I'm not up on game stuff.  My son was
installing a game for me (after saving the world using crypto during the day,
I like to own b*tch*s for about 30 min a night just to wind down...) and the
game required us to install PunkBuster.  I demurred and did a quick search.
 It seems that punkbuster is rather aggressive and there are claims that it
will upload a txt file to their server, if it looks to be of interest.  I was
horrified, naturally.

My son's pc gets regularly infested and restored from a
partition image, and he does not keep any sensitive information on it, so pb
is fine for him.  But I have to be a little more circumspect.

Anyone know
about pb?  All I know is that it is pretty standard, but not actually owned by
any big game producer.  If there's a question mark over it, then I'll have to
put the game on an isolated machine.

Mike N