Why does Opera dial home every web page?

I noticed Opera18 (latest), running Chromium engine is dialing home every single web page I visit with it.

I have off-road off. Opera_Updater.exe renamed to something different so the product doesn't update, or even check for updates. Unity isn't in 18 yet, and all phishing, malware, certificate checking is disabled.

Yet there it is, every page Opera 'checks in' with home base. Why?

http://i40.tinypic.com/2vvklza.jpg

Chromium and SRWareIron do not do this. Any tips or suggestions? It's a bit alarming to see a product dialing home with every shred of activity!

 

Sorry, answered my own question.

There is a setting hidden in About://Flags called "Fraud Check", disabled, Opera stops dialing home every page. Not sure how I missed this on my first scan through that area.

 

Well it still dials home, but only once in awhile..

I figure every couple of minutes it still seems to dial home. No clue why, as I have gone through and disabled every method it has an option for to do this. I am not inclined to allow any of my programs to dial home, but I like Opera18, so I am unsure what to do other than to block it with BotRevolt or something.

Anyone have any tips?

 

- Sounds like you have identified the IP Address(es) being contacted. Are the reverse DNS names descriptive/helpful in any way?
- Have you examined what you can via Wireshark or similar? What is the traffic... HTTPS or something else?
- Does Opera provide a means of displaying and/or logging all browser traffic including HTTPS requests/responses and behind the scenes traffic generated by the browser and extensions?
- Are there any Opera extensions that can display all such traffic?
- Have you ever used a MITM proxy (Fiddler, etc) to inspect HTTPS traffic?

- Are there any extensions or plugins installed that might be generating the traffic? Have you tried disabling those?
- Is there a feature to completely disable geolocation?
- Is the browser configured to monitor any RSS feeds?
- Does the phone home activity occur when you don't have any pages loaded (about:blank)? Does it only occur when you visit pages? Only occur when you visit pages via HTTPS?
- Sometimes you can cause an app to cough up a useful error message by (temporarily) blocking the outbound connections in question.