Avast Pulls the Latest Version of CCleaner Following Privacy Controversy (betanews.com)

Piriform, the maker of CCleaner, has pulled v5.45 of its suite from the website after users expressed concerns over the privacy changes in the application, the company, which was acquired by Avast last year, said. In v5.45, the company made it impossible to disable "active monitoring", and the privacy settings had been removed for free customers. Additionally, as BetaNews reported earlier this week, Avast also made it impossible for users to quit the software. Addressing these concerns, Avast said, "Today we have removed v5.45 and reverted to v5.44 as the main download for CCleaner while we work on a new version with several key improvements." The company added: We're currently working on separating out cleaning functionality from analytics reporting and offering more user control options which will be remembered when CCleaner is closed. We're also creating a factsheet to share which will outline the data we collect, for which purposes and how it is processed. [...] As stated before, we'll split cleaning alerts (which don't send any data) from UI trend data (which is anonymous and only there to measure the user experience) and provide a separate setting for each in the user preferences. Some of these features run as a separate process from the UI: we'll restore visibility of this in the notifications area, and you'll be able to close it down from that icon menu as before. We understand the importance of this to you all. This work is our number 1 priority and we are taking the time to get it right in the next release. There are numerous changes required, so that does mean it will take weeks, not days. While we work on this, we have removed version 5.45 and reinstated version 5.44. According to stats shared by the company, CCleaner has been downloaded over two billion times. In a week, it is estimated to see five million downloads.

Comments

CCleaner is only needed b/c sloppiness.

[Anonymous Coward]

If Microsoft would fix the implementation of the registry, then CCleaner wouldn't even be necessary. Or just get rid of it.

And it would also help if application developers would write their installation and removal programs correctly.

There is no excuse for the sloppiness.

Re: CCleaner is only needed b/c sloppiness.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, lets see, where's my settings? There's a dotfile with the name of the application in it. The settings are there.

So yes, replace it with /etc or dotfile or, hey, and hear me out, pretty much anything but HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/currentUser/whatever/whatever/whatever/whatever/UUID/(some dword key)

Re:CCleaner is only needed b/c sloppiness.

[AmiMoJo]

It does some useful stuff, like removing old crap files that Windows doesn't. Crash dumps, temp files. But that's it.

Bleach Bit does the same thing without the spyware, registry scans etc.

I disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

Many times during a failed install - yes, it does happen on Windows - the install program still puts a ton of shit into the registry.

Guess what? You try to install and it thinks the software is still installed.

Or, it buggers up something up.

And removal most of the time leave a ton of crap in the registry that shouldn't be there. And it makes it very hard when trying to fix an issue having to comb through crap that's not even used.

And there are tons of dipshit little issues that crop up on older machines because of registries that are full crap that's just not used. It makes it a support nightmare.

And then there's just the space it takes. I've seen registries on old systems get so large that cleaning them up makes a HUGE difference in available space.

No, sir. CCleaner is a valuable tool - I'll give them that.