Adobe apps phone home; tin foil hats on, everyone!
Anyone using Macromedia applications over the past few years, and was also paying attention, and was also a bit paranoid, realized that Dreamweaver, Flash, et.al., connected to Macromedia at startup. The “navigation page” or “startup page” that appeared in the MX2004 versions contained a section in the lower right corner that notified you if a new update or version was available, or if new content was available in the product line Exchanges. The only way that behavior could happen is if you had an active internet connection when starting the application, and if the application, Dreamweaver, for example, sent version identification back to Macromedia (otherwise, how would the application know if an update was available for *your* installed version?).
A blog post over the holidays at Uneasy Silence revealed details about the process. On January 9, 2008, Adobe posted a Technote describing the behavior and the steps to disable the connection.
The issue seems to be that we have chosen to ignore the data mining occurring on the web, and the tracking behavior of applications falls into the same category. Part of being connected in a digital world also entails leaving a path through that world. Gathering our tracks by data mining companies is not only simple, but built into most any connection we make to the net. Whether this data gathering is a problem depends on the level of trust we have for the people gathering and using this data. Transparency was cited by many posters to the article at Uneasy Silence. The problem is that many, many organizations with a web presence gather tracking information. And deleting cookies is no guarantee of fixing the problem.
So, what to do? We may have crossed a line, and there is no way to get the data removed, cleansed, or deleted. For better or worse, our digital lives may be better documented than our physical lives. The problem is that we don’t own the digital, personal data. The web analytics companies own it, and they’re not making it easy to control it. Simply unplugging won’t fix the problem. Eliminating computers from our lives is probably impossible without radical change that would be worse than living with a digital shadow.