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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

#451

Post by mdhardeman »

HelloNurse wrote: post #376
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…

Poisoned tech anecdote: I recently noticed that in one of my favorite bars the coffee grinder has a screensaver. Considering what should and shouldn't be done is much less popular than finding ways to do it.

I think one of the great signals of good ethical behavior is the person who'll refuse to build a thing that they know should not exist, even when offered a great reward if they'll do so.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#452

Post by dredmorbius »

snvzz wrote: post #407
catalogia wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux purposely makes proprietary drivers crap. As the situation on windows shows us, the alternative is drivers that are crap for other reasons. If Linux offered a stable binary interface for drivers, we'd have proprietary drivers that "worked" but were nevertheless still crap insofar as they were essentially malware, as is the case with this wacom driver.

If this was true, the BSDs would have terrible drivers. What happens instead is Linux drivers are mostly BSD ports. Go figure.

ISTR a discussion some years back over the lagging of drivers on the BSDs relative to Linux.

Not finding that now, though there's a 2014 discussion of a driver wrapper for FreeBSD to access Linux device drivers:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzMjY

Linux of course also makes use of some driver wrappers, the most well-known of which is probably NDISwrapper, supporting wireless networking cards:

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#453

Post by chopin »

zubspace wrote: post #179
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 understand the need for developers to know more about the hardware and software running on their client machines. For example, I believe information like the hardware survey from Valve [1] are very valuable for the whole industry. But there's a some kind of an etiquette you need to follow, if a company wishes to collect data: - Be straightforward. Say what information you are collecting, at what time and what for.…

Strangely enough, all your points are required under GDPR.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#454

Post by boudewijnrempt »

bitwize wrote: post #207
gruez wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The NSA is already selecting people with "Linux" [...] in their search histories for added scrutiny. Source for this? If it's true it would be both sad and hilarious.

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/nsa-linux-journal-extre...

That site hasn't existed for some time...

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#455

Post by diegof79 »

daemin wrote: post #387
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.

For those cases the app can collect the exceptions only (as many apps and OS do).

I worked on a desktop product with this type of data collection. Usually what happens is that after a new release you may see new errors coming up, and then they start to repeat. The data collection becomes a burden, new reports of the same error type doesn’t give you more information.

It’s a good opportunity for a good UX, e.g point the user to the relevant support info to solve the problem.

For support cases you may be able to ask for diagnostics on demand. The app can collect it internally without sharing and send part of it when an exception occurs and the user accepts to send it.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#456

Post by diegof79 »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #301
ipython wrote: post #21

The best part is where the author admits to using google analytics himself to track who visits his blog. At some point we all have to say enough is enough.

Why do people use GA? Every HTTP server generates a log. That's always been good enough for me. Then again my site doesn't have ads, so maybe that's the answer.

Ohh you bring me back memories of 1999 when I was using WebTrends to analyze http access logs.

HTTP Log analysis is slow, and requires a lot of server side setup. Also, it will not give you navigation events in a SPA.

Using GA... just drop a line of JavaScript and you are done, with near real-time insights that are more detailed than an access log. You don’t need any server conf, or extra knowledge (not even JS knowledge: copy & paste the embed code). And Google gives you that for “free”... that’s why tons of sites doesn’t care about Http access log analysis anymore.

For desktop apps is easy too. The GA API is very simple: send the app id, event + any event data you want. Your dev team can do that with self service (no need to setup a service, no extra costs to handle data).

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#457

Post by codezero »

nebulous1 wrote: post #395
codezero wrote: post #12

FWIW that isn’t a unique identifier for the author, it’s for Wacom’s GA account. I didn’t see any meaningful identifier being sent. Of course the set of most opened apps and your IP are probably enough to identify you. That said, yep, it seems lame they don’t disclose this tracking. I can understand why they’d want to know what apps their device pairs most often with, but tracking all app opens seems aggressive, but…

Isn't the cid being sent specifically to identify the user?

Heya - I could swear that wasn't there when I originally wrote the comment, but obviously it is there. Thanks for pointing that out. With that said, it doesn't change the substance of my comment too much - as I pointed out one can get a pretty solid unique identifier many ways, not limited to what I said above, you could even call out the presence of a permanently identifying header that Chrome gives some users[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236106

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#458

Post by codezero »

tbodt wrote: post #434
codezero wrote: post #12

FWIW that isn’t a unique identifier for the author, it’s for Wacom’s GA account. I didn’t see any meaningful identifier being sent. Of course the set of most opened apps and your IP are probably enough to identify you. That said, yep, it seems lame they don’t disclose this tracking. I can understand why they’d want to know what apps their device pairs most often with, but tracking all app opens seems aggressive, but…

The cid parameter (the one that's censored) is a unique identifier for the author.

Heya, replied to another comment that brought up the same thing, sorry about that - here's what I wrote there:

Heya - I could swear that wasn't there when I originally wrote the comment, but obviously it is there. Thanks for pointing that out. With that said, it doesn't change the substance of my comment too much - as I pointed out one can get a pretty solid unique identifier many ways, not limited to what I said above, you could even call out the presence of a permanently identifying header that Chrome gives some users[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236106

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#459

Post by Razengan »

2rsf wrote: post #378
Razengan wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil is actually a great alternative to traditional drawing tablets, even if you use Windows.

Not for professional drawing purposes

There are many professionals using it. See YouTube.

Re: Wacom tablets track every app you open

#460

Post by bri3d »

swiley wrote: post #428
bri3d wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two separate authentication processes for drivers on Windows: Authenticode, which is used for the kernel-mode driver (.sys) and is strictly enforced, and driver package signing (.cat/.inf installation packages), which has a mutable root storage called Trusted Publisher system store. Zadig works by adding its own certificate root to the Trusted Publisher system store and self-signing the installation package…

> Zadig works by adding its own certificate root to the Trusted Publisher system store and self-signing the installation package Is this different than the local CA cert list? Sorry I don’t use Windows.

Yes, it is its own list for software publisher signing specifically, and is separate from the Trusted Root Certification Authorities certificate store.
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