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

Re:"We understand the importance of this to you al

[guygo]

quite. If they understood the importance of it, why was it ever removed? Yuppie management BS trying to cover up lame monetization attempts that threatened the viability of the software. Typical.

What if software just did what it was told?

[Anonymous Coward]

What if software had a single purpose and just did what it was told? Wouldn't that be wacky

Re:CCleaner is only needed b/c sloppiness.

[richy freeway]

Ccleaner isn't and never has been necessary. It's bullshit software "cleaning" issues that never existed.

Re: "We understand the importance of this to you a

[mikael]

Security software companies have always done this. Like Cisco that tried to change the web UI of their home routers from local PC based to "through a cloud account".

There is nothing worse that having customised the security settings of a DSL wifi-router to the highest possible, only to find "We performed a factory reset to upgrade the firmware. All your security settings have been reverted to the default settings".

It's interesting to note that CCleaner gets annoyed that it can't reset and clear the log files of other security applications.

I've also noticed that some firewall software would log various events like failed login attempts, but after an upgrade, they would no longer log these events.