Aethernaut

Stephen Piriform, I was going to respond to each of your points but realised that I would effectively just be agreeing with Andavari above. I will say however that despite reading the post several times, I still cannot see how CCleaner phoning home for an IP lookup every 30 or so seconds to give you my ISP and location info can in any way help prevent DDoS atacks aimed at your network. Anyway, what you say may be perfectly true but I just don't believe anything that comes out of Piriform / Avast any more. I suppose that as I no longer trust CCleaner / Piriform / Avast the only thing I can do is uninstall the product from my machines and mobile devices and move on. This I have done.

I noticed that when CCleaner was running (monitoring was supposedly switched off and I'd supposedly opted out of everything else) my machine constantly contacted: ip-info.ff.avast.com shepherd.sb.avast.com analytics.ff.avast.com There appears to be nothing at ip-info.ff.avast.com but a search for the URL found a reference to http://ip-info.ff.avast.com/v1/info in an Avast support forum. This does work and going to the address displays accurate data under each of the below headings: ip address - continent - continentCode - country - countryName - City - timezone - latitude - longitude - isp* - asnNumber* - asnOrganization* - organization* - postalCode Headings marked * relate to my ISP, the rest are personal (including lattitude, longitude and postcode). I have not determined what data the other URLs are after, however I notice that analytics.ff.avast.com is included in tracking blocklists. Now uninstalled and the whole avast.com domain is blocked outgoing until I am happy it has actually gone.

Looks like the inability to disable monitoring is apparently being treated as a bug. https://forum.piriform.com/topic/52306-ccleaner-on-startup-and-wont-close/?do=findComment&comment=297916 Free version users being forced to share usage data is another matter...

After a recent upgrade of my Pro version I noticed the CCleaner icon sitting in the system tray and tried and failed to turn it off. I have found that: If the CCleaner monitoring startup link is disabled in "CCleaner/Tools/Startup" it is re-enabled. If the CCleaner monitoring startup link is deleted in "CCleaner/Tools/Startup" it is replaced and re-enabled. Any direct edits to the registry are ignored / reset upon boot. So CCleaner now takes steps to BYPASS ITS OWN FUNCTIONALITY and enforces always on monitoring despite the user knowingly and deliberately trying to stop it. I have only ever used CCleaner where I just run it occasionally, when I want to, to clean out any crud that has accrued. I have never needed it always on and watching. I am now a bit concerned that it is not possible to prevent CCleaner from always running and monitoring systems upon which it is installed. Also (in the free version) there is no user control or consent over what data this permanent monitoring collects and sends home. Does anyone have any idea what is going on here? Is this apparently "mandatory" monitoring related to software bugs or is this edging towards spyware-like activity?

I have a stored copy of the affected Pro installer and I can confirm that is does contain a 32-bit CCleaner.exe with an MD5 that matches the value published at #13 (https://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=48869&p=286414).