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by buddylw 2320 days ago
Wacom has application specific settings for compatibility. You can't have that feature without tracking individual processes and that data would be important for any sort of troubleshooting. It should be anonymized and they should be clear about what they are collecting, but the data does have a legitimate and benign use at least.
4 comments

Software side you're right, it makes sense for the driver to keep track of the current application for things like button binds, etc.

But that doesn't mean they need to transmit that information off your computer.

Although I agree, this is likely relatively benign, it's most likely useful as a market research tool to see what applications they should prioritize support/testing for.

> You can't have that feature without tracking individual processes and that data would be important for any sort of troubleshooting.

There is a pretty big between crash/error reporting vs constantly throwing data into Google Analytics.

Does this tracking data really need to be transmitted outside of the local environment, though? The driver simply needs to download a list of the available application profiles and compare it to the process list locally. Then, if a specific profile is available, it can request it and Wacom doesn't learn about the other processes running on the system.
> Wacom has application specific settings for compatibility.

I say: better to be incompatible instead.