I suspect that Wacom doesn’t really think that it’s acceptable to record the name of every application I open on my personal laptop. I suspect that this is why their privacy policy doesn’t really admit that this is what that they do. I imagine that if pressed they would argue that the name of every application I open on my personal laptop falls into one of their broad buckets like “aggregate data” or “technical session information”, although it’s not immediately obvious to me which bucket.
Does Wacom have any competitors? Can you even vote with your wallet, or is this yet another market that isn’t really a market at all?
They technically have competitors. For example Monoprice makes some gear that various bloggers consider to match or, in some cases, exceed Wacom’s equivalent offerings (and at lower cost) …aside from Wacom holding a patent on styluses powered inductively rather than by batteries.
There are even Linux drivers available for at least the ones I looked into via the DIGImend project.
The problem is that Windows or macOS users may still have to install the Wacom drivers in addition to the ones for the competing hardware because Wacom is synonymous with “drawing tablet” in the minds of people that some closed-source drawing programs only enable their tablet functionality when they detect installed Wacom drivers.
Example:
https://www.tabletsforartists.com/monoprice-tablet-review/
In a world of iPads and MS Surface, Wacom is in legacy mode.
I don’t think those two have better precision but excluding that I noticed that when I sign at the postal office, a bank or some shops they use Wacom tablets
I’ll be the first to admit this article highlights weaknesses in my defenses against google analytics tracking. I take this seriously, however my approach has been relying on browser based solutions to block unwanted tracking. However if an application/driver connects to google directly, then the blacklists are all for naught.
I should be blocking all google & 1e100.net tracking at the gateway.
The question is whether they use the OS-provided DNS services to look up where Google Analytics is. If so, then a HOSTS file should still protect you.
Thom Holwerda,
While it’s not up to me, it bugs me a bit that osnews is hosted by a provider (kinsta) that outsources hosting to google. While you don’t owe anyone an explanation, I find the juxtapositions difficult to comprehend: on the one hand osnews openly criticizes google, and yet opts for a google based hosting provider with their wallet. Why? There are so many of us hosting providers competing with google, why choose to fund google?
The big question is: does google perform server side tracking for 3rd party websites that are hosted from it’s servers? Server side analytics can be even more accurate and covert than google analytics. From a technical perspective, both kinsta and google have the ability to trivially track all activity on osnews without any third party tracking scripts (this means there’s no way for us to prove or disprove it). It’s impossible to know what they’re doing under the hood without taking their word for it. I looked up kinsta’s privacy policy to see if there are any hints of google getting web tracking data… however it seems to focus on kinsta’s direct users, without making explicit mention of kindsta’s users’ users (aka osnews users).
https://kinsta.com/legal/privacy-policy/
I’m glad that kinsta doesn’t “sell” the data, but they may “share” it data under a multitude of buckets and some could easily include google. Much as Robert Heaton discovered in this article, companies can take great liberties to stretch the buckets to include more and more data well beyond what a reasonable person would expect. Without evidence, I can’t make a factual conclusion about whether google uses osnews visitor data or not, but IMHO it’s just a bad idea to host on a platform owned by the most notorious corporate data hoarder in the world.
I noticed the article blurb lacks a bit of context that the wacom tablets were sharing data via google analytics, which is a service that google offers for free in order to obtain 3rd party tracking data. Without this tidbit, my posts against google tracking seem completely out of left field, haha.
I understand your point of view, and agree with large parts of it. But in this case there are other sites you could frequent. Wacom is industry standard in many disciplines and there is no other choice.
Under-phil,
Obviously I am here because of the people on osnews more than the technology it runs on, haha. But at the same time the internet continues to consolidate around the giants like google and amazon. The truth is I see this happening all around me and as much as I try I am helpless to stop it even with my own clients. We don’t need a crystal ball to see what the future is bringing, oligopolies at the top will continue to eat up the markets, solidifying their position as trillion dollar companies and beyond. We are going to see a significant collapse of alternatives in the next decade because these huge companies will either acquire the completion or simply absorbed all the customers for themselves until the competition dies.
I think that I know Thom Holwerda’s views enough to understand his opinion on breaking up companies that are too big for anyone’s good, but I don’t understand why is osnews itself is hosted on google? Deep down I know fighting this is futile in the long run, I wish more people would vote with their wallets to help alternatives stay in business.
I’m reminded of this blog post:
https://martinfowler.com/bliki/Datensparsamkeit.html
To be honest, when I read that post, it had never occurred to me to try to try to anonymize IP addresses through some mechanism like hashing (identifying unique visitors) or storing just the first three octets (demographic bucketing). As far as I was concerned, whatever landed in Apache/nginx access logs was fine as-is.
Of course they have competition. For example XP-PEN. The problem is Wacom’s quality is just that much better. For example Wacom monitors have a rough screen texture applied to them so it feels more like you’re drawing on paper, which seems exceedingly rare on any competitor’s screens.
Admittedly I did not read the article, but wouldn’t this only be a thing if you install their drivers? I never install their drivers, but then again I mostly use Linux, so don’t need to for full functionality…
Pretty sure I would also be safe using some of their devices on my Atari STs where now there is a newer USB driver for them…
leech,
I don’t know. It could depend on whether the analytics functionality exists in the driver itself or bundled software. With graphics cards, printers, etc I’ve seen windows update install the manufacturer’s WHQL driver automatically, but not the associated software.
Keep in mind this was a fluke catch by the author, if someone were to do a systematic audit of all products on the market, who know what we’d find in there!
I have used Wacom tablets but in recent couple years i changed to a Huion tablet. Much, much cheaper for the same size.
Having said that, the problem here is not the tablet but the black proprietary Windows boxes. You could bet that the software from the competition potentially does the same thing, who knows.
In linux most tablets are supported in-kernel and you just install open source software to calibrate them and you are good to go.
looks like since most people dont use wacom tablets or cintiq monitors, outside of CGI animation and Graphics work, this will go unnoticed sadly as animation studios have slim margins to fight the ood fight for privacy for the masses, and your normal corporate client will definitely not employ such expensive equipment, let alone the home user, I say it’s not much of anything. I say as an alternative, What are the goings on with the opensource drivers for wacom and Cintiq?
I’ve got an old Aiptek graphics tablet, but who knows if they latest ones do the same thing WACOM does… maybe they all do.