Forum Discussion
What is the domain "nrb.footprintdns.com"??
The domain nrb.footprintdns.com is owned by Microsoft and represents servers in Microsoft datacenters. It is used for telemetry purposes that comply with Microsoft privacy commitments that you can read about at: https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-trust-center-privacy. Data sent to this domain is used to identify network connectivity and performance issues and to support improvements to the service. We have plans to rename it to be more descriptive, and to publish it at the Office 365 IP Address and URL publishing site at http://aka.ms/o365ip. If you have any problems using Office 365 related to this, please raise a support incident so that we can assist at https://support.office.com/
I also decided to post on this in the Office 365 community, as all seems related to Office applications.
Apparently this domain is exclusively being used bij Microsoft to track your activity. That also explains why applications like Outlook and Excel both use it, but also website like Office365 and SharePoint. It looks like only authenticated users are being tracked, but I'm not totally sure.
The reason why Kasperspy comes up with an issue about the authenticity of the domain is rather simple: some application is trying to access a domain (*.nrb.footprintdns.com) while the channel (outlook.office.com or live.com depending from the application you use) uses a certificate that does not match the url.
So why is Microsoft doing this? Well, that's (sort of) easy. Tracking your users' activity helps improving the product. Okay, that's the political/marketing way of saying it of course. But for business reasons Microsoft is also collecting data from their users, for all kinds of reasons. I would never expect a company like Microsoft to sell data like this (for it would mean their destruction). But using it for ads, improving their products, statistical data for having the best availability will be among the reasons.
Also technically it's a good practise to use a separate service for this kind of activity. Being such a large company it's no surprise MSFT connected it to a different domain. Although it surprises me that they didn't use a microsoft.com domain.
I do know that they try to track, but naturally I won't like to be tracked, even when I am not doing anything that "deserve" to be tracked :-)
And doing it for the authentic (i.e. licenced) users, is something I won't even appreciate.
User Experience improvement ? I am old-timer, and I won't agree to, at the cost of invasion of privacy. Whether my data is being sold or not is immaterial. The raw data is collected, and I am sure is stored. The statistical report is next stage, and no one destroys raw data, even after the concise report is generated (at least as ex-student of Statistics, I won't, since these could be used for some further study, on some other aspect).
By the way, the Kasp had, when I checked, blocked Chrome browser too. That was done without notifying me. I am thankful to Kasp, except that they shouldn't bother me by notifying, let them just block these. May be I would have to tell Kasp, that after a few "Disallow" s, they could as well black-list these domains, for my subscription at least.
