Alastair’s Place

Software development, Cocoa, Objective-C, life. Stuff like that.

Corporate Conspiracies… Not

UNEASYsilence published a story two days ago about connections to 2O7.net from Adobe CS3 applications.

It’s scaremongering of the worst sort. The connections to 2O7.net are happening because the splash panel fetches a Flash graphic from Adobe’s website when you start the app. It is used to fill the bottom right corner, like this:

Picture 1.png

Anyway, when you load that graphic, it connects to Omniture (who own the 2O7.net domain) who provide site access statistics and the like. Big hairy deal.

It simply isn’t, as UNEASYsilence were all too keen to suggest, some sort of devious invasion of privacy on Adobe’s part.

There should be a variant of Hanlon’s Razor to cover this kind of thing. Perhaps something like

Never attribute to privacy infringement that which can be adequately explained by on-line content delivery, statistics gathering or software update.

It’s not quite as succinct now though. We need something snappier (suggestions, anyone?)

Or maybe people should just stop crying wolf every time Little Snitch tells them that an application is accessing the network.