John Nack of Adobe posted a brief Q&A related to the issue of Adobe software welcome screens phoning home to a tracking site hosted by analytics firm Omniture.
In the middle of the holidays, people began to notice and question how some Adobe applications pinged a remote server at 2o7.net. Omniture owns that domain; the requests from Adobe apps were destined for 192.168.112.2O7.net.
Some wondered if this represented a type of spying on Adobe customers. Nack posted a response to the topic, listing the occasions when Adobe apps make outside calls. He called the commentary on sites like Valleywag “wild accusations.”
Nack returned with a new post to follow up on the story again. He explained how all requests to Adobe.com also ping Omniture for anonymous analytics purposes; Adobe posted a tech note about this too.
The topic of the questionable subdomain used by Omniture came up twice. At a quick glance, 192.168.112.2O7.net may look like a local, non-routable IP address. Even the letter ‘O’ is capitalized, unlike the usual 2o7.net preference for lowercase.
It looked to us and to others like a blatantly deceptive name choice. Nack said on his latest post that Adobe didn’t really know why Omniture used that subdomain.
However, Adobe plans to have Omniture change the server name, presumably to something a little more self-explanatory. Nack has done well to respond on the story a couple of times, without getting defensive or accusatory, and that positive approach probably helped keep what seems to be a minor question of analytics from being blown out of proportion.
