Does anyone know why MacAfee Site Advisor (SAService.exe) needs access to the internet at startup? I guess I have to trust the program - but I don't understand why it needs to call home every day like this. (If I tell my firewall to block it, it doesn't seem to matter. Is it just a check for software updates?)

"McAfee SiteAdvisor Privacy Policy"

On my computer, Site Advisor tried to call home every few seconds after I blocked it in my firewall. That stopped after I uninstalled it from IE (I don't do searches from IE anyway). I have Site Advisor installed in Firefox and it doesn't call home. Updating is handled differently in Firefox. Firefox will alert you when an extension/addon has an update available.

Thanks for this. The following seems to be the most likely candidate for the 'call home' message:

Our software periodically sends us a unique, anonymous number so that we know that our software is working properly for you. This helps us know how many people are using SiteAdvisor and helps us plan the resources necessary to continue to provide you the great SiteAdvisor service.

But is that, in fact, what it's doing?

I suppose the question I'm asking is: why block it? I trust my AVG Security suite to have free access to the internet without keeping track of the details. Can't I trust MacAfee Site Advisor in the same way?

Let it call home, we got bigger fish to fry. There should be a way to tell the firewall to disallow this specific IP, but I haven't done that.
That said, every once in a while I switch to LinkScanner Lite because I don't have to deal with the nag screen of Site Advisor to buy this or that. I wish McA never bought them. They used to be good,superb in my opinion, but I worry they'll get ruined. But xpl is slower which annoys me as well. So I keep going back and forth