Ad tracking is out of control

[chrismasto]

As of the latest update, Fusion 360 connects to over 30 tracking/marketing services:

• adroll.com
• ads-twitter.com
• bing.com
• bounceexchange.com
• bttrack.com
• demandbase.com
• dotomi.com
• dstillery.com
• evergage.com
• adc-srv.net
• clicktale.net
• demdex.net
• doubleclick.net
• evgnet.com
• facebook.net
• g2crowd.com
• google-analytics.com
• googleadservices.com
• googletagmanager.com
• licdn.com
• linkedin.com
• qualtrics.com
• quantserve.com
• rtb123.com
• upsellit.com
• go-mpulse.net
• marketo.net
• omtrdc.net
• storygize.net
• tiqcdn.com
• yimg.com

It's almost comical. Is there anybody left you're not selling my usage to? And I have a paid subscription, so the excuse that it's free doesn't hold.

Amazing product, but I've been watching the number of trackers grow exponentially, and as we're all familiar with exponential growth these days, I'm concerned that there's a rogue product manager somewhere who needs to be quarantined before the engineers are spending 100% of their time integrating with new audience marketing networks.

[wmhazzard]

Any way to block all that?

[lance.carocci]

Not all these domains are associated with ad tracking, per se. A number of these are associated with analytics, including our in-app tutorials and general stats like operating system, preview option usage, language, or region - pretty standard stuff.

Autodesk's list of products is quite large, and many of our products (for example, Inventor and Fusion 360) may share analytics systems in one component, and different ones in others. This is to say that seemingly-redundant tracking is likely the result of different product teams needing to track different metrics or integrate with different systems.

Next, even if you are subscribed to Fusion 360, there are additional features available for payment within the application, such as Manufacturing extensions. Knowing the conversion rate of these offerings (you could call them "ads") helps us determine whether to adjust messaging or pricing based on things like bounce or click rate. In the end, that anonymous data is available only to us, and consumed only by us.

As I type this, I am watching my own traffic while using Fusion 360, and while I see a couple domains referenced in your post, I would say 75% of these domains (Facebook, Bing, LinkedIn, DoubleClick, to name a few) are not present in my decoded traffic streams. If there is a specific command or feature you can associate with these calls, please let me know and I can investigate further. My guess is that, because Fusion contains an embedded web browser that sometimes pulls in external websites, some of what you're seeing could be any combination of Autodesk.com, McMaster Carr, or another external domain being accessed through the Fusion 360 client.

To @wmhazzard's question of blocking these - sure, you could probably block a number of these in a firewall or other web debugger. But as Fusion 360 is inherently cloud-based, this may impact the client's basic functions, such as loading the Data Panel, switching Team Hubs, triggering a cloud solve or render, and probably a few other unintended side effects.

Ultimately, users can always opt out of these programs by going to Preferences > Data Collection and Use > and unchecking those boxes. If there is still traffic you suspect may be tracking you after doing this and restarting, please let us know.

[matt.berggren · Accepted solution]

Hi @chrismasto et. Al --

Thanks for reporting this!  The issue is something we are looking into.  Fusion is loading an Autodesk.com webpage behind the scenes which is why those show up.  It is identical to what would occur if you browsed to our public web page but we totally agree, it's altogether undesirable and not really necessary.  We will work to pare all of that back moving forward and optimize this so you dont feel something sketchy is going on.  Thanks again!

Best regards

Matt - Autodesk

[chrismasto]

I don't get to this forum very often so I only just noticed these thoughtful responses. I appreciate it.

The list I posted came from an application-level firewall (Little Snitch) just while starting up Fusion 360. I have noticed far fewer unexpected connections lately, which may be a result of changes Matt talked about, or else I'm just being less observant. In any case, both were excellent answers and even though this is an old thread, I wanted to pop back in to say thanks.

I'll try to remember to show up with positive things to say and not just complaints.