CCleaner has shot itself in the foot

This post comes from the following ghacks.net article

CCleaner is a very popular and recommended software that can clean, free up and refresh your computer. Whilst you could get CCleaner for free it was a freemium model and a paid version was highly pushed to users.

Avast a security and antivirus company bought CCleaner (July 2017) and all of a sudden “send data for analytics” toggles got etched into the program. It was clear CCleaner was getting data from its users and to make it worse they made it as hard as possible to turn of active monitoring.

As per the ghacks article the active monitoring will just turn itself back on again upon restart, sneaky. CCleaner is not an antivirus program it does not need to be running all the time. The original creator of CCleaner Piriform wrote a forum post where they explained that anonymous data is collected for improvement reasons, they do not say what data or how it is handled. As expected there are angry responses to the post.

Its a highly suspicious message, you can’t trust companies who aren’t transparent with user data. It’s a shame because CCleaner was handy when needed. But to be sold out to a larger company and then to collect data and use sneaky tactics to have the software run in the background at all times.

Would software want to run in the background all the time if it was collecting “improvement” data?