"In Wacom's defense (that's the only time you're going to see that phrase today), the document was short and clear, although as we'll see it wasn't entirely open about its more dubious intentions (here's the full text)."
The "document" is actually comprised of three documents. Lawyers call this "incorporation by reference." The link given by the author is therefore only a starting point. When we incorporate the other two^1 documents -- https://www.wacom.com/privacy and https://www.wacom.com/cookie-notice, this is not a "short" document.
1. Actually it is comprised of four documents if we include the external list of companies -- www.wacom.com/about-wacom/our-passion/our-company that are also beneficiaries of the terms of these policies. Unless the user reads all three documents, she has not reviewed the entire contents of the "policy".
"Wacom didn't say exactly what data they were going to send themselves."
Looking at the privacy policy is there anything that could be in HTTP traffic from the tablet that would be outside the scope of what Wacom has stated they might collect.
Excerpts
3. Scope of this Privacy Policy
This privacy policy explains how we collect and use information that relates to you when you:
- use our other software and products; or
We refer to these uses and interactions as our "Services."
|------------------------------------------------------------+----------------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------|
|Usage Information (e.g., indicators of engagement with our |(1) to improve our products and create |(a) with our service providers, including analytics |
|website or usage of Services, IP address, device identifier,|new products |providers, to help us deliver and improve the Services, and |
|etc.) | |to provide targeted advertising |
| |(2) to provide targeted advertising | |
| | |(b) our Affiliates |
| |(3) to better understand how our | |
| |customers' use our Services | |
| | | |
| |(4) for our internal accounting, | |
| |security, and operational purposes | |
| | | |
| |(5) for purposes required by law | |
|------------------------------------------------------------+----------------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------|
Usage Information. We collect information about your interactions with our services. This includes or can relate to your personal information. This information enables us to,
among other things, improve our Services and your experience, see which areas and features of our Services are popular and count visits, provide you targeted advertising based upon your interests and to analyze trends, administer our websites, track how you engage with our websites and other Services, learn about the systems, browsers, and apps you use to interact with our Services, gather demographic information about our user base as a whole. We also use analysis tools and methods to allow us to better understand how our customers use our Services. This includes how often the Services are used, the events that occur within the application, aggregated usage, performance data, any exceptions that occur within the software and the source from which the application was downloaded.
"Some of the events that Wacom were recording were arguably within their purview, such as "driver started" and "driver shutdown". I still don't want them to take this information because there's nothing in it for me, but their attempt to do so feels broadly justifiable.
Assuming Wacom respects resolv.conf as it does system-wide HTTP proxy settings, why not run localhost or LAN DNS server, either authoritative or recursive, that does not return a Google IP address for queries like www.google-analytics.com originating from the tablet IP address
The "broadly justifiable" reasoning does not account for the possibility Wacom may collect the data and then fail to improve the product, service or "user experience". Wacom is making no promises of any user benefits arising from collection of data. Even if there were "something in it" for the author, he has no way to hold Wacom to this promise. They get his data and he may or may not get something in return.