Adobe Quietly Monitoring Software Use?

henrypijames writes "For months, users of Adobe Creative Suite 3 have been wondering why some of the applications regularly connect to what looks like a private IP address but is actually a public domain address belonging to the web analytics company Omniture. Now allegations of user spying are getting louder, prompting Adobe Photoshop product manager John Nack to respond, though many remain unsatisfied with his explanation."

Comments

Not about spying

[75th Trombone]

To clarify the summary, the biggest issue is not the spying on users; the biggest issue is the deceptive server name, 192.168.112.2O7.net. It's at least meant to confuse unwary users, and possibly meant to confuse misconfigured firewalls.

As someone said on a blog I can't find right now, this is not a story about privacy; it's a story about lies.

Re:Not about spying

[IdeaMan]

Adobe may indeed be the innocent party here, depending on how Omniture code is included into their build.
What I found as a cause for concern is that it is tracking an embedded Opera browser.

No explanation is a good explanation.

[solios]

Simply put, the only things on my machine that should phone out should be voluntarily invoked by me - the user. Namely the web browsers, software update, ssh, etceteras.

Adobe's behavior of late (and it will only get worse) is why applications like Little Snitch exist.

This kind of thing is why I wish The GIMP or similar would get useable* for those of us with hundreds of gigs of Photoshop documents.

* Open, Save, full support for all blending modes, masking modes, layer groups, and fonts/text editing capability up to at least Photoshop CS. I don't need the thing to handle Exactly Like Photoshop, but if it's going to be the "photoshop competitor" every FOSS advocate claims it is (instead of, say, the Paintshop Pro competitor that it actually is), then it ought to at least be able to handle my existing documents as well as OpenOffice handles .doc files.

Re:Phisher's Delight

[ScrewMaster]

P.S. for those of you who have not set up a LAN, 192.168.xxx.xxx is typically an IP address for an internal LAN, not something out on the Web.

More to the point, the 192.168.x.x address range is one of several that are specifically intended to be non-routable on the Internet. Many people know this, even those who aren't otherwise that network-savvy. This is a blatant attempt to make the address appear safe ("well, I dunno what it's doing, but at least it's only sending to address on my LAN!") Not what one should expect from a major software house, but unfortunately, it is what we are all coming to expect from everyone in the business. Doesn't much matter what they're actually sending to Omni-whatever ... the fact that they're sending anything at all is very bad. Nothing on my system is their business, unless I say it is. Period.

You know, this reminds of something that Jack Valenti once said (about the only thing that sociopath ever said that I agree with): "Just because technology lets us do something, it doesn't mean we should." Now, he was referring to the copying and downloading of DVDs, but his point is still valid. We're seeing too many companies set up to serve larger organizations (Omniture, MediaSentry) using the Internet in unethical if not outright illegal ways. Presumably, this is so the corporation hiring them (in this case, Adobe) has some plausible deniability.

Re:2o7.net *Not* 207.net

[azrider]

Omniture's Opt-Out Policy:

We offer visitors to certain of our customers' websites a means for controlling the use of session information with respect to the Omniture SiteCatalyst, Omniture DataWarehouse, Omniture Discover and Omniture SearchCenter products using cookies set from Omniture's 2o7.net domain (i.e. that use the 2o7.net cookie to facilitate data collection). If, at any time a customer's website visitor does not wish to allow his/her session visitation information to be aggregated and analyzed by Omniture on such customer sites, he/she may utilize the following opt out mechanism. For customers that use non-Omniture cookies to collect data on their websites, please review the privacy disclosures of such customers for specific details on any and all applicable opt outs on such sites.

It was noted in one of the linked articles that the opt-out action sets a cookie on your machine. If you delete this cookie, you have just opted back in.

So let me get this straight. In order to tell Omniture not to do anything on my machine, I have to give Omniture access to my machine. What sort of half-assed policy is this?

Re:Don't yet have the full story

[fermion]

It is not a misleading server name, at least not anymore. Cognizant web users know 2o7.net, or whatever, is the cookie tracking site, and mostly blocks them. This company though liegitimate, does smell of sleaze. It was one of the first companies to use such social confusion, replacement of the '0' with 'o' so that in the days when one manually entered the domains to block, they would block the wrong domain. They are legitimate, and companies that work with them are legitimate, but the original sleaze factor is always there, and is obviously going to be transfered to clients.

This then leads to the question of why Adobe is using them for applications, which leads to think what has been aquired in the past year or so. I know. Macromedia. You know, that company that produces complicated resources hogging web content that unlike other resource hogging content cannot be filtered by most web browsers. I had hoped that Adobe might soften the rules and ship a flash player that was less user hostile, but no such new player exists. So, can we presume that instead of the user friendly Adbobe culture positively affecting the old macromedia products, that the end user hostile macromedia culture is infecting the adobe products.

OTOH, this product is a web design product, and most web designers get their money from ad revenue, so I would hardly think that the users of the product would have much problem with working with 2o7, kind of a necessary evil sort of thing. I can't imagine why adobe would use them at the design level, but overall I agree that it will be of no big deal to users of the product. To me, it is another step in the downfall of Adobe.