It is a marketable commodity and it is mine. E-rewards and every other market research company pays for market reseach. After all, the kids in the mall and paid for market research. If they want statistical iformation from me, they are welcome to it – if they ask me up front and want to offer me a damn discount. I don’t even set my programs to update w/o me. I *might* have agreed to give up some market research, but I read my EULAs pretty carefully, and I sure don’t remember seeing anything like that. Explain that to my kids, please.Īnd why should I have the bother of using two alternate computers for anything? I agreed to pay money in return for for software. I buy a $200 junker computer and that means one month I don’t buy groceries. I don’t think so, asshole, I am still paying off this computer. ![]() I *DO NOT* have the money for a second computer. I use this expensive software on my expensive computer for work. I own that software, and quite a bit of other expensive software for use in web and graphic design. It explains what the connection does and also admits that the company should have done a better job making it clear. Update 2: Further response from Adobe here. Will update again if any more details become clear. I’m not sure I understand why a live update function would call an analytics firm - or why the ping to that analytics firm should be disguised as a local network ping, but that’s the story coming out of Adobe right now. Update: John Dowdell, an Adobe employee (and long time Techdirt reader) has replied in the comments, noting that he’s talking to folks at Adobe to find out the whole story, but he thinks it’s the “live update” function. There may be plenty of legitimate reasons for tracking the usage of a piece of software - but if so, why not be upfront about it and let the user of the software opt-in to sharing his or her data? Yet another reason to use a firewall that catches these sorts of sneaky outbound connections. ![]() It’s really amazing that companies keep doing this type of thing thinking that people won’t catch on. While it may not be doing anything nefarious, this certainly has all the hallmarks of spyware, including the fact that it tries to (weakly) disguise the connection to Omniture by making it look like it’s simply pinging your local network. Of course, it does this without ever asking you if you want some random company knowing every time you use this piece of software. As highlighted by Valleywag, Adobe’s CS3 design software includes a system to provide your usage data quietly to a “behavioral analytics” firm named Omniture. However, it looks like Adobe has taken this to a new level. It’s not all that surprising these days to hear about software companies having their software “phone home” in some manner or another, though it’s often quite annoying. Fri, Dec 28th 2007 09:42am - Mike Masnick
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