Phoning home

Call Home (also phone home or Phoning Home, engl. " Call home " or " call home " ) refers to the action of a computer program, to contact the manufacturer or the server of the manufacturer via the Internet. The term was created after the saying of the aliens in the movie ET

Some Microsoft programs, such as the Windows Media Player in Windows XP, but also many other programs, especially large providers are known for said call home. In most cases the term has negative connotations and refers to the contact and data transmission to the manufacturer without the user's knowledge. A deliberately initiated by the user connect to the server manufacturer, eg for calibration or automatic version update program is not meant by the term call home usually.

A known face-up of users for example Call Home were the network printers from Hewlett Packard. When the company was reprimanded by the Data Inspectorate for it, you promised quickly to remedy this. Printers that were purchased after 2003, this function should not have more. A guarantee that there is not, however.

Some programs with call-home function before seen, this means disabling certain settings or changes to the values ​​of the system registry. For convenient management of these registry entries, there are programs like xp- AntiSpy that can change some undocumented Windows settings, and disable the call- home capabilities of various standard Windows programs. However, such tools can only well-known call-home actions stop and then only if the manufacturer has provided a cut-off principle. If this is not the case, contact the manufacturer server can be also prevented in that one registers its IP address into an operating system- internal block list. Programs such as Spybot - Search & Destroy offer this feature, but can also block only those servers from which it is already known that they will be contacted by some programs for the purpose of unwanted data transmission. In order to prevent any uncontrolled connection, so the use of a firewall is recommended.

Programs that operate call home are also referred to as spyware, especially if the function of a program is limited almost exclusively to the collection and transmission of data.

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