Wacom Drawing Tablets Track the Name of Every Application That You Open

Robert Heaton:

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 […]

Wacom’s privacy policy does say that they only want this data for product development purposes, and on this point I do actually believe them. This might be naive, since who knows what goes on behind the scenes when large troves of data are involved. Either way, while I do understand that product developers like to have usage data in order to monitor and improve their offerings, this doesn’t give them the right to take it.

Sad and unacceptable.