I use a cintiq 13HD on GNU/linux with the wacom driver, and I can report that it does not phone home in any way.
I use opensnitch to explicitely whitelist (or reject) any app that wants to access network, nothing related ever popped up. Additionally, I run my own dns resolver on a raspberry pi to monitor dns request logs of all my devices, and I confirm it doesn't log anything when I plug my tablet and start using it (this doesn't help if the software tries a direct connection by IP).
Additionally, I've read the code of the driver, since it's FLOSS, and didn't see anything suspect in it. I can confirm this is actually the code I'm using, because I'm running Gentoo and I inspected directly the tarball used by my package manager to build the driver.
So, obviously, I could still have missed something, but it looks to me like solid enough evidence for me to trust the software (at least, its current version). If it tries funny business in the future, I'll see it pop up anyway (plus, I block all requests to google-analytics ). My bet : Wacom put those "features" only in windows/macOS driver, presuming users of those OSes don't care about privacy, or at least not as much. This doesn't make their behavior acceptable, obviously.
EDIT: I realize there are actually two parts in the driver, a X input driver and the kernel driver. The one I checked was the X input one. I've just checked the sources of my kernel (directly the ones used to build the kernel as well), and there is no issue there either.
I use opensnitch to explicitely whitelist (or reject) any app that wants to access network, nothing related ever popped up. Additionally, I run my own dns resolver on a raspberry pi to monitor dns request logs of all my devices, and I confirm it doesn't log anything when I plug my tablet and start using it (this doesn't help if the software tries a direct connection by IP).
Additionally, I've read the code of the driver, since it's FLOSS, and didn't see anything suspect in it. I can confirm this is actually the code I'm using, because I'm running Gentoo and I inspected directly the tarball used by my package manager to build the driver.
So, obviously, I could still have missed something, but it looks to me like solid enough evidence for me to trust the software (at least, its current version). If it tries funny business in the future, I'll see it pop up anyway (plus, I block all requests to google-analytics ). My bet : Wacom put those "features" only in windows/macOS driver, presuming users of those OSes don't care about privacy, or at least not as much. This doesn't make their behavior acceptable, obviously.
EDIT: I realize there are actually two parts in the driver, a X input driver and the kernel driver. The one I checked was the X input one. I've just checked the sources of my kernel (directly the ones used to build the kernel as well), and there is no issue there either.