This was a well-written fun read, and I also both care about privacy a lot and have also used Google Analytics on a site too, but at the same time I’m a little bit floored how quickly his own use of GA was assumed benign while Wacom’s was assumed malicious. (Using GA is handing tracking data to Google, after all.) I don’t think the “it’s just a mouse” is a valid justification for this double standard. My browser is “just a viewer”; I’m getting tracked before I click on anything on your page. If we’re going to care about privacy deeply, I think we need to be a little more rigorous together.
This makes me wonder something as a developer - it’s not just tempting to have analytics and telemetry, it’s very, very valuable data if you care about the customer experience. And for companies that don’t do anything with this data other than improve the customer experience and fix crashes, this data is also valuable to the customers and users. So the big question here for developers is how can we collect usage data safely without compromising privacy? What data is safe to track, and what data is not safe to track? Personally I assume there are many kinds of seemingly innocuous data that could be misused. Even tracking mouse location can reveal things to an adversary. What can we do as developers to prevent customer experience from becoming adversarial? Is the only answer to not send any data? Or is there a technical way to establish and maintain trust between users and apps?