Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

robertheaton.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 234 posts

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

#161

Post by kapp_in_life »

redwall_hp wrote: post #110
kapp_in_life wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The need to know what art applications to test their product against and what hardware configurations they might need to write drivers for. For example, is 99% of their customer base using GiMP or are they using Photoshop? Its important to know how to allocate their testing resources. They could ask permission first but this sort of telemetry is a nothingburger in my opinion, as unpopular as that might be on this for…

For art, probably neither actually. Those are both photo retouching/raster manipulation programs. Something like Krita or Clip Studio Paint is more likely for drawing.

Plenty of artists I know personally use Photoshop with tablets, and a few use clip studio or sai. Probably depend on the circles you know.

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

#162

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

pacija wrote: post #141
haxiomic wrote: post #2

This was a wonderful read I think when I was younger I’d assumed the sheer number of technical users out there would mean it would be hard for companies to get away with things like this but these days I realize this sort of analysis and public exposition is actually rare and the number of skilled developers investing time in this is slim Perhaps collectively as a community we can create public bug and privacy bounti…

It is becoming harder and harder to troubleshoot which apps talk what to which servers because all off them, including OS, talk something all the time. Back in the day if user told me they have a problem accessing some Internet content I would instruct them to close all the applications and start to dump their traffic on firewall and proxy. There wouldn't be any traffic from their IP address. Then, when they started…

Protip: you can configure Windows Firewall to block all outbound traffic on a per-process basis. It’s not advertised as a feature though. There’s also ‘netsh http’ too. (I’m not sure how to block HTTP requests originating in the kernel though)

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

#163

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

breakingcups wrote: post #124
7thaccount wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. It only takes one mistake of that magnitude to lose me as a customer forever.

I take it you both also boycott Sony Music Group?

I haven't bought a Sony branded anything since 2000 or so. I almost forgot what it was about (yeah, the CD root kit and the battery-draining DRM shenanigans). I just put them out of consideration for any purchase.

(Yeah, I know, "not really the same company, etc". It is, and it's the brand. Live by it, die by it.)

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

#164

Post by contingencies »

jaclaz wrote: post #58

Besides the specific Wacom related issue, I find this snippet fantastic: >The first is a principled fuck you. I don’t care whether anything materially bad will or won’t happen as a consequence of Wacom taking this data from me. I simply resent the fact that they’re doing it. I have rarely seen the concept expressed in such a clear, direct manner.

I am a long time Wacom customer and this pisses me off too. I will certainly be trying out alternative brands in future. How about organizing an open source hackfest for alternative tablet brands? Some alternative tablet manufacturers: https://www.veikk.cn/products/ (绘客) https://www.huion.cn/ (绘王) https://www.gaomon.net/Pen_Tablet/ (高漫) https://www.ugee.com.cn/ (友基) https://www.parblo.cn/ (Parblo) http://www.penpower.com.tw/ (蒙恬; Taiwan) https://www.xp-pen.com/ (XP-Pen; Japan)

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

#165

Post by dreamcompiler »

At this point I don't think there's a solution for this crap except regulation. Any PM of practically any product that has a software component is now expected to include revenue-generating spyware in the package; if she doesn't she gets fired. Regulation is the only solution.

And the fines need to be stiff, like $10,000 per incident per user. It's gotta hurt or companies won't stop doing it.

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

#166

Post by josephg »

na85 wrote: post #80
codedokode wrote: post #75

There is a myth that if you are a paying customer then you are not a product. As we see, for more and more companies like Wacom, Microsoft or Apple you are a product no matter if you pay or not. Have some self respect and vote with your wallet against such companies.

Do Wacom tablets have any relevant competition? I have one that I use for hobbyist purposes and when it comes time to upgrade I'd be interested in not buying another Wacom.

> Do Wacom tablets have any relevant competition?

I’m not sure if this counts as relevant competition but I’m migrating away from my Wacom tablet to an iPad + Apple Pencil. As well as procreate, an iPad can act as an external display for a Mac - and when connected, the Apple Pencil works as a stylus in macos applications.

It’s way more expensive though - especially with the Apple Pencil. And macos only.

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

#167

Post by duskwuff »

Lev1a wrote: post #122
krylon wrote: post #20

The sad thing about this is that there are perfectly valid reasons for Wacom to want certain information, like what hardware do their customers connect the drawing tablets to, what operating systems and applications do they use. This is useful information to have, in the sense that Wacom can choose where to put their resources, what applications to test for, etc. But the very fact they are so damned sneaky about it m…

IIRC correctly Steam has a (yearly?) hardware survey which their users have the option to take part in, collecting information about parts in the computer and about connected periphery devices, i.e. model names, no. of monitors, resolution, amount of RAM, ...

And Valve is very transparent about how that works -- the survey displays a detailed opt-in each time the user's data is collected, and the results of the survey are public (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey).

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

#168

Post by playpause »

breakingcups wrote: post #124
7thaccount wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. It only takes one mistake of that magnitude to lose me as a customer forever.

I take it you both also boycott Sony Music Group?

If boycotting something comes at a personal cost to the boycotter (such as having to put up with a lesser product that fits their principles better), and they don't have the time or energy to boycott everything that challenges their principles, does that mean they should boycott nothing at all?

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

#169

Post by Iefthandrule »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #165

At this point I don't think there's a solution for this crap except regulation. Any PM of practically any product that has a software component is now expected to include revenue-generating spyware in the package; if she doesn't she gets fired. Regulation is the only solution. And the fines need to be stiff, like $10,000 per incident per user. It's gotta hurt or companies won't stop doing it.

Don't companies lobby legislators to prevent this?

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

#170

Post by dpacmittal »

I don't understand why desktop operating systems still don't ship with mobile style sandboxing. It would be so darn useful to restrict applications from using filesystem, or have access to only certain folders, or restrict them from internet access.

I recently wanted to install a crypto currency wallet on my linux machine but I was terrified of the fact that every single software on my machine can access the whole of filesystem and can easily steal keys to the wallet. Eventually decided it's just not worth the constant worrying.

Post reply on HN