Wacom tablet drivers track apps you open

Robert Heaton actually read the license agreement Wacom whas users of its tablets sign up for. Alarmed by the expansive, vague clauses therein, he set about intercepting the data going between the gadget's drivers and Wacom's servers. They track every application you open. [via fnordius]

I suspect that Wacom doesnt really think that its acceptable to record the name of every application I open on my personal laptop. I suspect that this is why their privacy policy doesnt 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 its not immediately obvious to me which bucket.

Its well-known that no one reads privacy policies and that theyre often a fig leaf of consent at best. But since Wacoms privacy policy makes no mention of their intention to record the name of every application I open on my personal laptop, Id argue that it doesnt even give them the technical-fig-leaf-right to do so. In fact, Id argue that even if someone had read and understood Wacoms privacy policy, and had knowingly consented to a reasonable interpretation of the words inside it, that person would still not have agreed to allow Wacom to log and track the name of every application that they opened on their personal laptop.

The wildest thing is Wacom seems to have noticed he was doing tests on their servers that would expose the data collection, and turned it off for a while. Read the rest