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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

#381

Post by jpttsn »

laughinghan wrote: post #309
hnick wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be a real challenge for some companies. Having a clear privacy policy creates a hard dependency between it and the code. And developers are notorious for not even being able to keep comments updated along with their code changes. It's not impossible at all, just in the current state of the industry there's a good reason we have vague agreements (also including good old-fashioned laziness, of course). It'd…

So what? Informed consent is also "a real challenge" for some medical studies, does that mean we should let doctors carry out unethical studies? I'm actually pretty sympathetic to Wacom in this instance, more sympathetic than the blogpost author at least. But unethical actions are unethical regardless of whether acting ethically is "a real challenge" for some companies.

The deep problems of “informed consent” are apparent in medical studies/treatment. Few patients are equipped to be informed because they don’t have a med school degree.

Since users ”can’t be informed” about tracking, it doesn’t make sense to discuss whether they “should be informed”.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#382

Post by diegof79 »

I work on UX, coming from an engineering background. It means that everyday I work close to product management and engineering.

The trend over the last 10 years is to collect tons of data to improve the product. Some PMs and UXrs believe that they’ll get a magic insight from the data, and the skeptics do it anyways because is another data point to have. For engineering, services like GA are cheap and easy to integrate.

Nobody has a bad intention. But, we are distracted by the next product release to see the long term consequences for the society.

The reality is that some data is useful, but most of it is BS. To measure adoption and engagement you can do a pilot and then deactivate data collection. Big app errors are reported soon after a release, and you don’t need to continue collecting that for a long time.

To improve the UX you can do research with less data points, and smaller groups. The irony: I wish to have data to prove it, my hypothesis is based on my experience. I got more actionable insights from qualitative research, self-reported metrics, or quantitative data focused in certain aspects (instead of collecting all just in case). Some times having nice reports based on tons of data is more useful as an argument for corporate politics rather than to improve the product, but users doesn’t need to pay the consequences of your company stupidity (I’m looking at you MS telemetry ;-) )

There is a simple thing that we can do to change this trend. Ask yourself: What is the goal of collecting the data? What product hypothesis you want to prove? Can you get insights from a small group? If you don’t know.... hold on your data collection desires.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#383

Post by pvaldes »

mkl wrote: post #244
pvaldes wrote: post #72

I received one as a gift but, to be honest, I never used it after seeing the obscure mandatory propietary format to save the files. If I can't open my files later in GNU and there is not a method at sight to save it as jpeg, png, etc... is useless. Just a cheap model probably. Collecting dust somewhere. My other wacom, and older model, was awesome as a mouse replacement; but it toke months to work in Linux and I don'…

Wacom tablets work fine in Linux, Gimp, Krita, etc. in my experience (and haven't required significant setup for over a decade). Why are you trying to use obscure proprietary software instead?

> Why are you trying to use obscure proprietary software instead?

I'm not trying. In fact, I rejected that Wacom tablet exactly for that.

Some time ago when you unbox a product it was not uncommon to hear something like: "Sorry but as you are a Linux user we, the makers, will try to make your journey miserable not providing any support. Ha haa!. Maybe some volunteer working for free will fix this new model in six months. Maybe not".

Sorry maker but as you don't provide drivers for users like me, I will not use it. Bye. Have a good day.

They do not laught so much today

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#384

Post by jmiskovic »

L-four wrote: post #329
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…

Ads enabling free online content is a bit of a glazier's fallacy. Yes, when ads are an option most content producers will be funded by ads. it's simple to implement and does not require end user consent but as soon as the degenerate strategy is removed new strategies become viable such as micro-payments.

I think the potential of micro-payments was never reached because transactions are currently too large, and uni-directional. If we could process payments of $0.01, it would create a culture were you are actually willing to pay for content. Also, if you make a insightful comment, a product review, or even a upvote, you should receive some credits to spend back on consuming content. Doesn't have to be blockchain, it would be effective even if limited to one site or content provider.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#386

Post by account42 »

roelschroeven wrote: post #77
arsome wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... if you install and configure popularity-contest, which includes an explicit opt-in process [0] and it still doesn't track usage, merely installation. [0] http://www.linuxandubuntu.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/con...

It's a tiny bit more than that: popcon weekly reports which packages have been used that week based on their atime. atime, ctime and filename are reported (the times are truncated to a multiple of twelve hours). See https://popcon.debian.org/FAQ (thanks to toastal for the link).

Wait people still leave atime enabled?

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#387

Post by daemin »

diegof79 wrote: post #382

I work on UX, coming from an engineering background. It means that everyday I work close to product management and engineering. The trend over the last 10 years is to collect tons of data to improve the product. Some PMs and UXrs believe that they’ll get a magic insight from the data, and the skeptics do it anyways because is another data point to have. For engineering, services like GA are cheap and easy to integrat…

The one technical reason I see for doing this is to help in dealing with customer bugs and complaints. So strictly in a diagnostic capacity.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#388

Post by Piskvorrr »

userbinator wrote: post #321
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…

Not too long ago I had to do some INF editing to get a driver installed on Win10, and the editing did invalidate the signature so it (silently!) refused to install, but booting with the "disable driver signature enforcement" option made it install, and it continued to load and work normally even after I booted back into normal mode. This was only a few months ago so unless something drastic has changed since then, ma…

Sounds like my Linux experience in the late 1990s: lots of weird invocations without understanding what they do, just to keep the system barely functional. The roles sure have reversed...

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#389

Post by raxxorrax »

sigh... their tablets are quite good if you like to paint digitally. Time to look for non existent third party drivers for windows.

This is why a software firewall can be helpful. Since I use Windows I expect there are no alternative drivers.

You can use the tablets without drivers in a very restricted manner. I don't know how to solve this besides strong regulations. Big firewall to China?

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#390

Post by Piskvorrr »

roelschroeven wrote: post #77
arsome wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... if you install and configure popularity-contest, which includes an explicit opt-in process [0] and it still doesn't track usage, merely installation. [0] http://www.linuxandubuntu.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/con...

It's a tiny bit more than that: popcon weekly reports which packages have been used that week based on their atime. atime, ctime and filename are reported (the times are truncated to a multiple of twelve hours). See https://popcon.debian.org/FAQ (thanks to toastal for the link).

Which is still a far cry from "opts you in by default (!!!), and collects every time (!) you open the program."
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