CCleaner has started making a number of changes to its software after users kicked off over the level of monitoring the software utilises on each installed machine. The software is available in both free and premium variants. The parent company of CCleaner was previously owned by Avast which was once a victim of the cyber attack when the hackers were able to modify the 32-bit edition of the CCleaner and CCleaner Cloud to serve malware to customers.
Customers are now furious since the new update as the changelog of the version 5.45 states the software has been added with “more detailed reporting for bug fixes and product improvisations”.
Ghacks have released a statement based on the changelog saying that it broadly covers data collection which most users are not pleased about. There are two new monitoring systems in the software named Active Monitoring and Heartbeat that sends user data to the CCleaner servers as anonymous usage analytics and also pings users simultaneously by scanning for unnecessary files.
The company has stated that heartbeat sends only non-personal and non-identifiable usage information for the sole purpose of improving the product. There is an option to disable these active data collection threads, however when many users have been trying to turn off the tracking, the software had to be ‘force’ restarted for the changes to take place.
The new update has taken much control away from the user such as the lack of options to shutdown the monitoring scripts. Many users have started looking for alternatives to CCleaner however some are in hope that the company will fix the issue as soon as possible.
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