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Wacom tablets track every app you open

robertheaton.com

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Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#191

Post by ken »

jrockway wrote: post #170

I wonder what the comfortable medium between privacy and letting developers get feedback about how well their code works is. It seems to me like Wacom just wants to know if their drivers work, so they can focus engineering efforts around fixing the issues that are affecting their users. "Oh hey, the new beta of Photoshop breaks our drivers!" They don't make a "cloud product" and they have an obligation to make their…

I have a Wacom tablet. The drivers don’t install on macOS any more. There doesn’t seem to be any technical reason for this. It’s a USB device (“essentially a mouse”) and it worked fine for several major versions. Maybe it was a 32/64 issue.

You’d think if keeping users happy was their primary goal, they might start by keeping their existing USB drivers compiled for the current macOS.

They don’t need me to email them to tell them it’s broken under current macOS. They’re the ones who told me!

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#192

Post by CamperBob2 »

JohnFen wrote: post #181
13hunteo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read a lot of comments recently about how Google Analytics is bad, but no one explain why. Can I ask why this is not something people want? Is it not anonymised?

> Can I ask why this is not something people want? I block it because the data it collects is none of Google's business. Being "anonymized" doesn't make it any better.

It literally is Google's business. That's what they do. They're an ad agency. They sell you.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#193

Post by JunaidBhai »

DerWOK wrote: post #157

Really great article. But I wonder, why the author did not cover if/what the driver publishes, If I do: - open "Wacom Desktop Center" - Top right (next to "Login") is "More" (click!) - "Data Privacy Settings" (click!) - "Participate In Wacom Experience Program" => on => off! My setting was "On" - and I swear: whenever a program/website/installer asks I go "No thankx". So it must be dark UI patterns with evil defaults…

Dayum. Almost every designer in my team at https://draftss.com has a Wacom tablet.

I guess I'll have to send a company-wide emailer along with the above instructions. Thank you very much for your writeup.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#194

Post by JohnFen »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #192
JohnFen wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can I ask why this is not something people want? I block it because the data it collects is none of Google's business. Being "anonymized" doesn't make it any better.

It literally is Google's business. That's what they do. They're an ad agency. They sell you.

I know that Google builds its business on the backs of user data. That doesn't change the fact that data regarding me or my machines is "none of their business" in the colloquial sense. That Google forcefully disagrees is what makes them a spy agency.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#195

Post by JohnFen »

irq11 wrote: post #177
JohnFen wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder what the comfortable medium between privacy and letting developers get feedback about how well their code works is. I consider the nut of the problem to be informed consent. If you have user's informed consent to get the feedback, then there is no problem. If you don't, then the whole operation is unacceptable. And no, mentioning it in the privacy policy or terms of use don't count as "informed consent".

Thing that I know happens, from personal experience: you can put a giant modal alert, and write in blinking, all caps, 60pt bright-red font that you will do something unless the user presses a button, then draw a bright red arrow to the button. Users will still complain that they weren’t informed. Users are lazy and dumb, and the most ideological users are often the laziest and/or the dumbest, because they have an ag…

If your goal is to eliminate user complaints about this, justified or not, then just stop intrusive data collection entirely. Then you don't need to bother with obtaining consent.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#196

Post by KajMagnus »

lightswitch05 wrote: post #45

This is just one of many reasons to use StevenBlack's Hosts [1] list to block this type of behavior. While it doesn't currently block link.wacom.com, it would have prevented the subsequent requests google analytics. It works even better when paired with a PiHole [2] to protect all devices on the network. [1] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts [2] https://pi-hole.net/

Is there a way to create a whitelist instead of a blacklist?

In some VMs / computers, I'd like to whitelist Internet domains instead of blacklisting, for security reasons.

Edit: Seems PiHole supports whitelisting: "Manage White And Black Lists" https://pi-hole.net/

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#197

Post by a_e_k »

Kalium wrote: post #120
vageli wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know this is the popular conclusion - but from a developer perspective, data such as what software your product is used with is INCREDIBLY valuable for project planning and prioritization. People hate web tracking, but knowing what browsers or devices are visiting your website can be enormously helpful. What happened to actually communicating with users to learn more about how they use the product?

That assumes a great deal about both the resources available to do it and the ability to get responses from a representative sample of customers. It's not challenging to see why someone might choose a one-time cost in software engineering over an ongoing cost in communication.

I really like the approach that the Steam survey uses which blends engineering and communication:

1) Pop up and ask for permission to scan the machine.

2) Show the data collected that will be sent back and give a second chance to decline.

3) Allow everyone to see the aggregate results.

Being mostly automated, it's lower friction than a manual Q&A survey. But it also feels way more respectful that trying to snoop around and then clandestinely exfiltrate the data. It's one of the few cases where I'm willing to opt-in to data collection.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#198

Post by comex »

danShumway wrote: post #76
durpleDrank wrote: post #38

Saw this two nights ago installing the driver on Windows 10. Read the UELA. Did not consent, closed the window. Is that good enough? By the way, My tablet works MUCH BETTER on Ubuntu and Mint than on Windows 10. Krita and MyPaint are cross platform so I might just do my art on a *nix box instead.

Off topic, but would you be willing to expand on your Linux experiences with this? I'm currently doing all of my digital drawing on an old SP3 tablet running Manjaro, via Krita. The driver support is... acceptable, I guess. Krita has more than a few annoying edges, but shows a lot of potential so I've been sticking with it. For a long time I've been considering springing for a dedicated setup with one of Wacom's larg…

Well, that kind of thing is what the return policy is for, isn’t it?

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#199

Post by jyrkesh »

vageli wrote: post #119
penagwin wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is the popular conclusion - but from a developer perspective, data such as what software your product is used with is INCREDIBLY valuable for project planning and prioritization. People hate web tracking, but knowing what browsers or devices are visiting your website can be enormously helpful. Also I don't know all the details here - I know that Vizio TVs where collecting data and explicitly kept the IP a…

> I know this is the popular conclusion - but from a developer perspective, data such as what software your product is used with is INCREDIBLY valuable for project planning and prioritization. People hate web tracking, but knowing what browsers or devices are visiting your website can be enormously helpful. What happened to actually communicating with users to learn more about how they use the product?

It's a confirmation bias problem. Customers who fill out surveys and give direct feedback back to vendors are frequently lower-usage enthusiasts that aren't representative of your overall userbase.

I work on a product, and we include some telemetry. I'm also a strong privacy advocate, and I believe I've done my best within the corporate realm to ensure that the data we're collecting is extremely scoped AND useful for decision making and prioritization. In my experience, there aren't that many of me, but I implore folks to realize that as PMs and engineers, we absolutely do have a say in making sure that blanket data exfiltration and aggregation doesn't happen in our products.

Communicating with your customers proactively about what you're collecting and why is important too. And not buried in some privacy policy legalese: publish a blog post, explain what you're gathering, give examples of how it's driven decision-making for you in the past, and what you're hoping to learn in the future. It goes a long way.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#200

Post by stefan_ »

swiley wrote: post #190
stefan_ wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also the little matter of Windows (since 7 I think?) requiring kernel drivers to be code signed, unless you want to run your system with a permanent "Development mode" text overlay, not to mention the arcane procedure required to activate that in the first place. (You can't add another cert to the trusted set, either.) So that puts a little damper on the whole "open source" thing. Of course it is also not ef…

That’s trivially easy to get around by installing you’re own CA cert when you install the driver. This is arguably worse security wise but it makes the driver install process identical to the way it used to be as far as the average consumer can tell. This is why (IMO) free software is so important, to the point where I’ve begun to agree with the radicals and think it should be mandatory.

No, that's exactly not how it works. You can not change the set of root certificates.
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