My firewall software warns me that Essential NetTools is "attempting to access the Internet." I am aware that some sites are able to track users by collecting the information sent by their programs via the Internet. Why does Essential NetTools "attempt to

What alerts your firewall is the attempt to resolve IP addresses to hostnames, which is necessary for showing the hostnames in the NetStat tool. Since Essential NetTools has to contact your DNS servers to make a DNS query, it inevitably triggers the alarm. You can disable this feature (Settings => Options => Disable DNS resolving), but in this case the NetStat table will not be able to show you the hostnames.