Evidence Adobe uses analytics to sample CS3 user behavior

Users of Adobe's programs are taking issue with an apparent feature within the company's products that is sending out some type of data to an outside service.

Dan Moren of Uneasy Silence first posted about the apparent data sniffing on Wednesday night. Using a program for Mac OS called Little Snitch, he was able to discover Adobe's hidden practice.

The data transmission was discovered in Adobe InDesign CS3 for Mac, although from Moren's post it apparently seems this data transfer extends onto all CS3 programs.

In any case, at first glance the address may look like a IP address, and a local one if that. In many routers, 192.168.xxx.xxx is used for internal networking. However this address looks different.

Data is sent to 192.168.112.2O7.net. Two things would appear immediately awry to the experienced eye: first, no IP address includes any alphabetic characters in it, this address includes the letter 'O' in place of a zero. Second, it ends in '.net,' and no IP address ends in any kind of DNS suffix.

So where does this data apparently go? Loading up the address itself in a web browser takes the surfer to a page owned by Ominture, a large web analytics company.

"Yes, I am a tin foil hat guy. The sky is falling, the NSA is listening and Adobe is watching how many times you open your programs. Okay, the first two can't be proven but I can show you that Adobe is spying on users application habits," Moren wrote.

Apparently, Adobe has already addressed this through an article on its Devnet site. It says it uses Omniture to track usage of an application to 'create better user experiences.'

The company could not be immediately reached for comment on Moren's findings.