Dear John Nack, how dare you?

I’ve been lightly following a certain set of stories regarding Adobe phoning home whenever you start up CS3 products. The basic idea is this; When you start a CS3 product, it sends a few packets of information to 192.168.112.2o7.net, which is actually just a subdomain for the website 2o7.net, which is owned by Omniture, a statistics company.

I’m not saying they’re giving away my social security number, I’m not saying there are even any privacy issues here. However, two things are awry in this scenario. The first is that they’re trying to hide the website address by disguising it as a local-looking IP address. The second is that they’re phoning home, no matter what the information is, without my permission.

Guess what, Adobe? THIS IS SPYWARE.

John Nack, the product manager for Adobe Photoshop, took it upon himself today to write a blog post about the situation. In this post, Mr Nack is lashing out at users and customers without providing a single answer.

The main point that John keeps bringing up is that a lot of people are on holiday, so it’s the perfect time to put up some major speculative post, because the companies involved won’t be able to respond. He likens it to 2 posts that have occured in the past two consecutive years… which are also about Adobe.

John, I think you’re a little too concerned with yourself. The prior posts and this one occurring around the holidays are merely coincidence.

In addition, John, you quoted Doug Miller saying that “There are only 3 places we track things via Omniture anywhere in or around our products”. Given that this 2o7.net example was not listed, it makes this statement inaccurate and therefore quotable with a grain of salt. You can’t deny that the products are contacting 2o7.net… so there are 4 places you track things via Omniture.

Nowhere in your post do you address the following; 1) Why is the address intended to be hidden? 2) What information is Adobe collecting?

Instead of peddling the idea that your customers and users are crying wolf, and instead of defending yourself to the point of insulting your customers intelligence (Crying wolf?? No common sense??), you should concentrate on finding out the real reason behind the 2o7.net domain.

Until then, you should probably shut your mouth before your foot ends up in it. Oh, and run your post by HR next time if you want to save a bit of face.