War on Adobe

Adam Curry has declared War on Adobe and claims it’s the most evil company on the planet! In NA 521 he reveals how Adobe, along with it’s Omniture advertising platform, mines internet traffic data, not only for advertisers but for government agencies. Omniture has built an enormous new data center in Utah (Adam wonders if it’s connected to the nearby NSA data center). Omniture, now renamed Adobe Insight has published a white paper for government agencies which Adam read during NA 521 and has posted to the episode’s show notes.

Adam’s reading of the white paper revealed that Adobe’s pitched to the government intelligence capabilities which the government claims they don’t perform. Combining intelligence billions of data points including open sources like the internet and closed sources like the government databases, Insight provides real-time actionable data for US security agencies.

From the white paper:

Every phone call, credit card transaction, and visit to a website creates a data point that is collected and stored in a different system. 

and:

In addition, intelligence analysts must identify patterns and persons of interest from billions of raw data points. They need to quickly combine cell phone, Global Positioning System (GPS), email, and call detail records to produce valuable intelligence, and they need to explore vast volumes of data without the help of a large IT team creating a new view or cube for every new question that arises.

Steve Jobs kept Adobe’s Flash out of iOS for many good reasons (technological, data mining and security) but now Adobe is working its new PrimeTime video ad platform into iOS.