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Wacom tablets track every app you open

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Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#331

Post by remote_phone »

sizzle wrote: post #224
bitL wrote: post #223

It looks like everything in tech got poisoned, smart TVs taking screenshots, web apps tracking and matching user clicks, smartphones tracking locations realtime and who knows what else, desktop apps monitoring other apps and peripherals, creepy companies building profiles on everyone, health institutions selling data of their users... I want out, I didn't get into this field, keeping myself up-to-date and super capab…

"just to make somebody with a limited lifespan feel powerful and rich." Wow that last sentence really puts things into perspective. How can be reverse course and throw a wrench in the system? We are the makers, we should be able to wrestle back control and do it democratically and get politicians on our side to legislate this ad industry into the ground.

Create enough noisy data so that the data these companies receive is so unreliable that they give up. Have a Chrome extension that runs and clicks on things randomly or a separate app that controls the mouse that feeds bad data. If it ran on every computer maybe Google AdWords might become useless.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#332

Post by warent »

bArray wrote: post #323
TeMPOraL wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First step would be to kill advertising-based models. Get them banned. Because it's the advertising industry's race to the bottom that poisons everything, and fuels the creation of surveillance infrastructure. With ad-related snooping gone, it will be much easier to rein in the remaining few players who misuse data in pursuit of optimizing their business models. (And yes, I know ads enable a lot of free content on-li…

There was a time before now where advertising was effective and didnt track you - it was the advent of targeted advertisement which really killed things off. Can we go back to the days where an advert was was just an image and a hyperlink? Where advertisement paid by the pixel and location on the website? Where JavaScript was unused unless in some rare and warranted cases? I still believe the web can be a free and op…

Most ads that I remember when I was new to the internet were all running flash and had really annoying circus-game-like objectives such as "Can you shoot the basketball through the hoop?!?"

I hate the means by which advertising is targeted today, but I would be lying if I said the format of the ads themselves were more annoying or less useful than the past.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#333

Post by jacurtis »

anonu wrote: post #325
TeMPOraL wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First step would be to kill advertising-based models. Get them banned. Because it's the advertising industry's race to the bottom that poisons everything, and fuels the creation of surveillance infrastructure. With ad-related snooping gone, it will be much easier to rein in the remaining few players who misuse data in pursuit of optimizing their business models. (And yes, I know ads enable a lot of free content on-li…

This is just a non starter and a pipe dream. It goes against the principles of capitalism and free enterprise. You need to think about incentives. You have two tablets, identical in functionality and performance. But the one without the ads and surveillance features costs twenty percent more. Which one do you buy? Actually Kindle did this for a while (maybe they still do...). I ended up buying the cheaper one with th…

Can confirm that Kindle does in fact sell devices that are ad-supported.

For a $20 one time fee you can remove this feature (which can be done after purchase at any time). But most people won't notice the tiny option select on the amazon purchase page that defaults to "with Special Offers".

To make it even more confusing, they make it sound like the better option to pick is the ad-supported version. I mean you are choosing between the model "with special offers" or the one "without special offers"? Most people that don't know any better will leave the default "with special offers" options selected.

Source: https://www.amazon.com/All-new-Kindle-now-with-a-built-in-fr...

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#334

Post by tmpAa »

bitL wrote: post #223

It looks like everything in tech got poisoned, smart TVs taking screenshots, web apps tracking and matching user clicks, smartphones tracking locations realtime and who knows what else, desktop apps monitoring other apps and peripherals, creepy companies building profiles on everyone, health institutions selling data of their users... I want out, I didn't get into this field, keeping myself up-to-date and super capab…

I'm 100% like you feel. I also did a top uni for years, it was super stressful but I eventually managed. Now I just got a work at a tech company similar to Wacom. I thought okay, we all know how unethical are Google, FB & friends, but a company selling hardware accessories only, c'mon no way it should not be too evil... Well that Wacom story is cute in comparaison to what they do. Ofc they also log all apps used like wacom, but they are also implementing systems to analyse if you have health issues from your peripheral logs, analyse your emotions and stress level from microphones & cameras, facial recognition, eye gaze, etc.

I love technology and computer science but tech is so screwed up in terms of ethics.

I wish we'd see more people coming together that care about this (like truely care, not the #Tethics of the sillicon valley) to make some open and private alternatives to all this toxicity. But it is super hard to make things change.

I'll work in that direction in my free time, but I feel so alone. HN seems the only place people care a bit about that. Around me at uni or at work, the level of ethics and care for privacy is so low, it's depressing. It's not only that "rich boss" telling its employees to exploit people's data, it's also engineers themselves being happy collabo of this because they make huge salary working for those companies.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#335

Post by Mizza »

friendlybus wrote: post #306
bitL wrote: post #223

It looks like everything in tech got poisoned, smart TVs taking screenshots, web apps tracking and matching user clicks, smartphones tracking locations realtime and who knows what else, desktop apps monitoring other apps and peripherals, creepy companies building profiles on everyone, health institutions selling data of their users... I want out, I didn't get into this field, keeping myself up-to-date and super capab…

I wanted to add on the list of privacy invading examples. It's better I make the counter claim. The data collected has massive potential to improve medical research. Being able to validate database wide experiments on hundreds of millions of people at once is pretty incredible. There's likely to be a decade of insights to be found in this rapidly filling digital ocean of information. In several years the clamour to g…

I recently encountered a company that uses ad-tech pioneered identification techniques to snake around patient privacy laws and clinical trial anonymity to sell re-identified data back to insurance companies.

So no, fuck that.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#336

Post by viknod »

They have all the data from the uninformed, ambivalent or defeated already. We develop things to crush the remaining resistance. Walled garden devices, cert pinning, signed applications, DNS over HTTPS, yes they are all more secure, but not for you. If well implemented, these serve as tools to make sure the privacy policy is the only thing informing you of collection.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#337

Post by Mizza »

marta_morena wrote: post #268
II2II wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Wacom's driver an example of excessive monitoring? While the author presents the graphics tablet as a glorified mouse, tablets usually offer many more features. How those features interact with various applications is important, and they have to prioritize which applications they support. The data collection that the author describes may be viewed, internally, as part of that process. Now I am not claiming that Wa…

Or the failure may be on your end, believing that "many people are sensitive to data collection" while in fact, most people don't give a dusty fuck about it and happily share everything for saving a few bucks a month. Hackernews is NOT the people. HN represents a TINY TINY fraction of users.

That's why we should give a fuck on their behalf. In a techno-capital society, it's too much to expect normal people to have to know the technical details of all of these things.

I don't know anything about water treatment or nuclear power, but I still expect the people working in those industries to be held to extremely high standards of competence, virtue and accountability.

We should have the same standards. We don't, so instead we need to demand regulations for these monsters.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#338

Post by rotterdamdev »

bitL wrote: post #274
devteambravo wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know of anyone working on such an effort?

Self-hosted apps/DApps come to mind however they are still alpha-quality. It might take some time (~5 years) to replace 90% of expected FAANG functionality.

Alpha quality? Nextcloud? What are you smoking.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#339

Post by rotterdamdev »

opepp0 wrote: post #297
sizzle wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"just to make somebody with a limited lifespan feel powerful and rich." Wow that last sentence really puts things into perspective. How can be reverse course and throw a wrench in the system? We are the makers, we should be able to wrestle back control and do it democratically and get politicians on our side to legislate this ad industry into the ground.

Working on a Kubernetes based clone of Instagram. My plan is to deploy it and a VPN tunnel and give certain folks access to keep in touch. I’ll have instructions for self hosting and VPN key creation/sharing (Wireguard ftw) There’s absolutely no reason to bother with cloud services. They’re nothing but big corp coopting our problem solving. It always comes down to be gatekeeped but no one having the guts to gate keep…

There is already a FOSS replacement for Instagram, with privacy settings. Pixelfed.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#340

Post by mixmastamyk »

moron4hire wrote: post #116
betageek wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, there are no application specific configs set on default install of Wacom drivers, just a generic 'All' profile. If, and only if, I had set up an app-specific config, then maybe Wacom would be vaguely justified in tracking when I open that specific app. 'wantonly collecting unrelated data' is exactly what they're doing.

We aren't talking about Facebook or Amazon or Google here. I think we can walk back the apocalypsism. Most companies aren't well-oiled, gigantic machines of user-data-manipulation. I'm sure there is a better way for Wacom to do things. I'm also pretty sure their staff are doing the best they can.

Sounds like you're not aware of the large and growing b2b consumer data market.
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