Adobe Spying On CS3 Users

It all began with a post at UNEASYsilence titled "Lies, Lies and Adobe Spies" which caught on to the fact that Adobe CS3 apps were calling out to a suspiciously-crafted IP address. As it turns out, the IP in question—192.168.112.2O7.net (note the capital O instead of a zero)—is not an IP at all, but rather a domain owned by statistics-tracking firm Omniture.

Criticism and conspiracy theories quickly erupted across the web, calling for an answer from Adobe over what looked like a clear invasion of privacy crafted to look like a typical local IP address.

According to Nack's investigation, Adobe's CS3 apps call out to Omniture's services to track a few usage statistics across Adobe products. Specifically, only three things are tracked: the news items presented in some apps' welcome screens, Adobe-hosted content loaded in Bridge's implementations of Opera and Flash Player (Bridge is the asset management component of Creative Suite), and Adobe online help systems like forums and the Exchange service, but only upon a user's request.

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