What is geo2.adobe.com?

[sea_hunt]

Finally had to install Flash for a must-have feature on a website on a new computer. Whenever I use the latest version (29.0.0.140), it wants to phone home to geo2.adobe.com. I blocked the connection and Flash worked anyway, so that's a positive. I leave location services turned off on my home machine, so is Adobe trying to circumvent my preferences?

System information:

Mac OS 11.13.4 (High Sierra)

Safari 11.1

Flash Player 29.0.0.140

[_maria_]

Are you seeing the request when you install Flash Player, or when viewing Flash content?

What is your geo-location?

[sea_hunt]

It happened when using Flash Player on a website after a fresh install of the latest version. I have dug through every TOS/Privacy policy/License I can find on Adobe's site and there's nothing about geo-location specifically--only IP address which could be used as a rough geo-locator.

I rarely use Flash and typically install it, use it, uninstall it. I've monitored my network connections for years and don't remember seeing outgoing connections when using Flash Player in the past, but could have a faulty memory.

[jeromiec83223024 · Accepted solution]

Sorry, I was trying to copy and paste the title and clicked answered.  I appear to lack the permissions to change it back.

I'm poking around internally to try and get you some official documentation.  The explanation is mundane, but I want to make sure that it's 100% accurate.

In the meantime, rather than asking you to take my word, I'd encourage you to just take a look for yourself.  We're explicitly very transparent about what we're doing, and the requests are readily inspectable.  For HTTPS requests, you can use a web debugging proxy to see what's going across in cleartext. 

For this request in particular, you can literally just type the address into a browser:

http://geo2.adobe.com/

For convenience, this is what's coming back for me:

http://geo2.adobe.com/

Country: "US" Accept-Language: "en-US,en;q=0.9"

In contrast, if you're not familiar with what your browser normally sends for each request, you might find the fingerprinting section here enlightening: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Hope that helps!