6 ms·
The sad thing about this is that there are perfectly valid reasons for Wacom to want certain information, like what hardware do their customers connect the draw
by krylon 5y ago
The sad thing about this is that there are perfectly valid reasons for Wacom to want certain information, like what hardware do their customers connect the drawing tablets to, what operating systems and applications do they use. This is useful information to have, in the sense that Wacom can choose where to put their resources, what applications to test for, etc.
But the very fact they are so damned sneaky about it makes it look really shady. Why not openly ask the users those questions and show them what information would be sent to the vendor? (And I am pretty sure Wacom is but one of many companies behaving this way.)
I vaguely recall using some applications built-in crash report a couple of years ago, and it was a) explicitly opt-in, and b) showed me (after asking me if I wanted to see it), verbatim, the data it was going to send to the vendor, including stack trace and stuff like that, and then asked me again if I wanted to send that crash report. (Unfortunately, I do not recall what software that was, though. sad emoji)
So I know it is not only possible to handle these things differently, but some people/companies actually do that.
- dylan604 5y agomacOS does this any time an application "quits unexpectedly". You can Ignore, View Report, Send Report from the dialog.
- Sindisil 5y agoMost Linux distributions have a similar mechanism.
- m4rtink 5y agoAFAIK for example on Fedora this (ABRT) is opt in and only sends "thing crashed" if you opt in. You need to explicitly manually check and confirm a full crash dump before sending it, so really not anything being done without the user knowing, at least on Fedora.
- duskwuff 5y agoSome parts of the report are deliberately anonymized, too -- for example, if an executable is running from the user's home directory, that path is literally displayed as "/Users/USER/" rather than including the actual username.
- dylan604 5y agoSeems like it would be easier to use ~/ type of something. At least the path would be useable/valid while still being anonymized.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jodrellblank 5y ago> "Why not openly ask the users those questions and show them what information would be sent to the vendor?" Why not pay money to people who spend time helping Wacom improve their products? Then lots of people would willingly help, fill in surveys, test configurations, write feedback, etc.
- colinwilyb 5y agoIf you offer cash to customers then you are setting yourself up to receive reviews primarily from those who are in need of cash or have "spare" time. A person employed full-time who uses their tablet daily may be missed entirely. [edit: Not that this is entirely wrong, but it must be one-of-many approaches for customer feedback.]
- nottorp 5y agoNo need to pay money even. Just ask the customers: "what applications are you using our product for?" No one who buys such a peripheral would mind; they'd all like it to work better with their drawing software.
- tsumnia 5y agoThis is why I reject the counter arguments "Your data is why X service is free" or "If you're not paying for it, you are the product". Even when we are paying for something, we're still getting spied on.
- 8note 5y agoIt's capitalism. Every potential revenue stream will be exploited to its fullest potential. To show similar growth to their shareholders, they'd have to charge you more, so you're data is still paying for X
- jacquesm 5y agoI don't see any valid reason for Wacom to look at what application people use. And in a proper operating system that information should not be easily available (not without the users' consent).
- littlecranky67 5y agoAny examples for those proper OSes? I can only imagine those often critized for being walled gardens, namely iOS, Android, and proprietary hardware like gaming consoles. On any UNIX used as a desktop, you will not have trouble finding a list of running processes.
- jacquesm 5y agoQubes. It's essentially VMs around every application, browser instance or service.
- littlecranky67 5y agoAnd that has what market share amongst wacom tablet users?
- lolpython 5y agoMarket share describes what state the world is in. I don’t see what bearing that has on a discussion of what the world should be. OpenBSD implemented the ASLR security mitigation as default in their operating systems first. Windows and macOS followed years later. I don’t think they did so because of OpenBSD’s market share. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomization https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomi...
- kapp_in_life 5y agoThe need to know what art applications to test their product against and what hardware configurations they might need to write drivers for. For example, is 99% of their customer base using GiMP or are they using Photoshop? Its important to know how to allocate their testing resources. They could ask permission first but this sort of telemetry is a nothingburger in my opinion, as unpopular as that might be on this forum.
- coldacid 5y agoMozilla products used to do this, but I don't think they do anymore.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jsnell 5y agoBecause for the data to be useful even for totally benign purposes, it probably can't be collected just once. For example, the biggest signal I would try to extract for product purposes is users who open an app, try using the pen, and then give up and continue using it with the mouse instead. You can't get that information by collecting information at install time. Could you write a trigger in the driver to detect this, and only ask for consent then? Probably not, since that gives you only the numerator without a denominator. Now, if they really aren't asking at all, that is shady. But asking just once rather than on every interaction seems basically mandatory to get the data needed for product development.
- Lev1a 5y agoIIRC correctly Steam has a (yearly?) hardware survey which their users have the option to take part in, collecting information about parts in the computer and about connected periphery devices, i.e. model names, no. of monitors, resolution, amount of RAM, ...
- duskwuff 5y agoAnd Valve is very transparent about how that works -- the survey displays a detailed opt-in each time the user's data is collected, and the results of the survey are public (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey).
- account42 5y agoWell the collection part is transparent (so there is no privacy issue) but they don't disclose how and how ofthen they select participants or even how many participants there were for each survey.