I have RealPlayer installed, but my firewall won't let it phone home unless I approve each send. You can probably guess how many times I've allowed it. (You don't need fingers or toes to count it.)

I can still view content that requires the player, but it's not sending data back to the mothership.

Dan

>as far back as i can remember real's products always sent lots of data back to their servers, thats why i won't install it on my pc, its always had a bad rep for this. not having it is a pain some times as a lot of sites have news clips etc in real format only, although some have media player formats as well.
>Slán
>~M
>
>>>The possibility that other vendors may be equally bad (or more so) brings me no comfort. The Sony debacle, the DoubleClick lies, the controversy surrounding the Windows wmf "backdoor" claims by Steve Gibson and others, etc, etc, etc, shows us that apparently companies time and again cannot resist these temptations to spy on and collect stats and demographics on their customers ...
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>>Two other examples, mentioned on Steve Gibson's site: Netscape Navigator, and some program from Real, both sending too much information home with every download made. In the case of the program from Real, the username and the email address was sent home with every download. The "bug" was later fixed in both cases.