We cannot allow our devices to go into "the cloud." Especially so, 
we cannot allow our privacy to everything we write, by hand, get sucked 
into this blackbox of power. This week, that circumstance happened when 
reMarkable announced they were going to send members' handwriting into 
reMarkable's (or a third party, like a public cloud provider) computers 
to be analyzed. In return, they will send to the device a small portion 
of the data they've generated to perform automatic handwriting 
recognition; the rest, they keep for themselves.
     While the feature itself is very important, the method in which it 
was implemented was done with little regard to user privacy. I cannot, 
in good conscience, allow my deepest personal thoughts to be written 
anywhere but my own devices. I have refused to become a member of the 
reMarkable online service.
     The Newton, a product by Apple in the 1990s, also had handwriting 
recognition. The Newton team performed this feat on the device, within 
seconds, and with an eighth of the CPU clock cycles. On a Newton, one's 
notes are private. So, why aren't they on a reMarkable?
     Granted, reMarkable has allowed me to use my device without 
registering for their "cloud" service, which I am grateful for. They 
have done a good thing by allowing users to hack their devices. To 
boot, one may transfer documents via SSH, which itself is incredible to 
use: effortless. I cannot allow such a keystone device (in my life) to 
go this direction.
     If reMarkable leadership is reading this, please: perform 
handwriting recognition on the device. If you want to keep your cloud 
service for shuttling documents, fine; I can hack my own way in Bash. 
But, please: functions like this--which have the potential to greatly 
improve the experience of the device--belong on the device. It's too 
important for the freedom of your users. Moves like this may make 
people, the loyal ones who have looked past the reMarkable's blemishes, 
leave. That will be the deathspell of your company, and possibly too
of the wonderful device that plays a vital role in my day.