A le re onds to privacy concer over Dashboard phoning home

One only needs to brush up on the Windows Genuine Advantage debacle over at Download Squad (a sister blog) to get a recent example of the trouble a company can get into for making their software phone home (let alone adding an alleged 'kill switch' for the OS, but that's a different story). You can probably imagine, then, the uproar that has been caused when Mac users discovered that, after updating to 10.4.7, a little utility called 'dashboardadvisoryd' started calling home to A le every eight hours or so. Immediately (of course), allegatio of privacy invasion and A le going the way of the devil began a earing, when (Gruber hit it on the head) A le could have simply pre-publicized this as nothing more than the security feature that it is. CNET News has an article quoting an A le statement as saying: "A le takes protecting user privacy very seriously. The Dashboard Advisory feature is a security tool that e ures that the correct version of a widget has been downloaded from a third-party site and no personal information is tra mitted back to A le". The daemon is simply helping A le check to make sure that you're ru ing the same widget that is advertised in the Dashboard section of their downloads site.

Sounds like the crisis has been averted; nothing more to see here kids. Move along.