Hello John,
Thanks a lot for your very informative reply.
There are indeed two groups of IP addresses that SmartWare tries to access regularly. I had already read about this UPnP stuff somewhere else, and your text comes as a nice confirmation. As for the other IP addresses, my SmartWare is trying to connect much more often than just once per session, and not always to the same address. In any case, it is much more often than if it was only checking for updates, in my humble opinion.
As a consequence, I am blocking all internet traffic related to SmartWare, and I’ll update it when I choose to. I haven’t had any problems over the last few days, after I started doing so.
I still think WD should be more transparent about all that : it is great that more and more hard drives come with encryption solutions, but there is definitely room for improvement if they want to gain the confidence of consumers for which privacy matters.
Anyway, thanks again for your message, which will undoubtedly be of help to many.
