CCleaner is not complying with its legal obligations. The problem does not go away by Ccleaner insisting that the pop-ups are not advertising. I purchased Ccleaner through Cleverbridge.
At first blush, the pop-ups seem to be reminders to resubscribe, but when you follow them are actually promotional upgrades, are months in advance of my licence expiry, and on at least one occasion wrongly stated that my licence had expired. That is promotional advertising. Cleverbridge is in breach of its own privacy policy which states “Without your prior explicit consent, we will only send you Product-related announcements that are not promotional in nature (for example, notices related to your purchase of Products or information regarding the renewal of subscriptions) and only when we believe it is necessary to do so.” The notices include renewal, but go much further. 22 popups in three months is not simply alerting me to the approaching end to my licence. I neither want nor need to be peppered by these unwanted promotions, sometimes more than once a day.
At the very least, the popups are first party direct marketing. I live in Australia, so Australian Privacy Principle 7 applies (I think parallels exist in Europe and North America). That means that even if Ccleaner believes it should send me these popups and genuinely think thay are renewal subscriptions, it must provide an easy way for me to opt out. If I do opt out, it must stop sending them to me. I have opted out many times, and Ccleaner has just ignored me. I have tried to contact the Privacy Officers of Ccleaner, Avast, and Cleverbridge, but after 6-10 weeks none have not responded.
Over to you Ccleaner. What are you doing to comply with your privacy obligations?
I am not trying to purposely turn anyone away from such a great product, but, at the end of the day, there needs to come a point where you ask yourself if you are still compatible with the software.
I too am a long time user, and as a tech, once upon a time I used to recommend this software to every customer. But once Avast took over, and it all went to s**t, I stopped recommending to anyone.
But still kept using it myself. Originally I did not mind, as the price was not too bad, even though all the cleaning can be done without the aid of a program, but what can I say?, we are all lazy, and it is far easier to do it all at the press of a button, instead of taking all the necessary steps that are automated for us. However, the price has risen 200% in 4 years, or 100% at the "loyalty discount" price. And then there is the issue of pop-ups and non-advertising-advertising.
Now, as to the annoying pop-up advertising that is not advertising apparently, I have worked out the correct way to finally stop it.
If you simply right click on the windows icon or perform a search, there is a built in program in Windows called "Programs and Features"
This will bring up a list of programs.
Select "Ccleaner" and on the top bar, you have "Organize" and "Uninstall/Change"
Select "Uninstall/Change", click "Next" and you will find all those non-advertising pop-ups should stop.
You will probably have to block emails too, but this will definitely stop the non-advertising-advertising pop-ups.
You are then free to download the free version of Ccleaner, or one of the multitude of better programs out there that are still in the spirit of the original Ccleaner
I have to agree with the other customers who are complaining about the popup. Out of all the software I have installed, yours is the only one that has any form of popups. My other software either places a notification in the software when opening in an un-annoying way or sends a notification email from an address that is for renewals only. The latter allows the customer to move advertising emails from subscription emails. Give us the option or develop an un-annoying way to inform your customers within the software. CCleaner was suggested to me by a Tech Support company, and now that same company is removing it from their clients' PCs. I loved CCleaner in the past but now at a point of reevaluating the software.
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Note that those are not ads. The example you gave was of a loyalty discount offer in a renewal reminder related to your subscription because you are coming up to expiry at some point in the near future. From a couple of months before expiry you'd be getting a reminder about every 2 weeks - although when there is a special limited-time promotional discount available you may get 3-4 in the space of a week.
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If you are receiving renewal reminders more frequently than this, then (unless you are very close to your expiry date) the most common source of such overmessaging is if you have accidentally configured CCleaner to wipe the "I have already seen this message and I don't need to see it again" flag as a result of removing too many things from the cookie cleaning whitelist. The fix for this is to go to <strong>Options > Cookies</strong> in the CCleaner console, right click in "Cookies to Keep", select Import and import the cookies.txt attached here - which should resolve that problem for you.
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<a class="ipsAttachLink" contenteditable="false" data-fileext="txt" data-fileid="14635" href="<___base_url___>/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=14635" rel=""><span>cookies.txt</span><span> <span><span>134 B</span><span> · </span><span>51 downloads</span></span> </span> </a>
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If you are getting other notifications relating to CCleaner having found something to clean that you don't want to be notified about, that is configurable through Options > Smart Cleaning.
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Those privacy settings relate to data <strong>processing </strong>rather than notifications, per se. That said, a few times a year we may offer discounts on CCleaner Professional to <strong>free </strong>users (usually as 1-3 notifications per campaign, depending on how long it is running for), and those who uncheck that "See possible upgrades and offers for our other products by sharing app-usage data with us" will generally not see most of these.
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If you are in the US, Piriform has not changed the price for a 1 PC licence of CCleaner Professional from US$25 since it first went on sale ~10 years ago. For users with multiple PCs, the CCleaner Professional Plus bundle for $40 was boosted to support up to 3 PCs back in May 2019. We understand that not all of our users can afford CCleaner Professional, which is why we have an ongoing commitment to always offer a free version of CCleaner, along with our other performance and privacy tools.
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Advertisement : a notice or announcement in a public medium promoting a product, service, or event
That is literary an ad, call it whatever you want, it's still an ad. The goal of this popup is to push you to subscribe, that's why it's a popup, that's why it's tough to get rid of. If it was just a "reminder" it'd have appeared one time within ccleaner, not every two weeks for months, and not as a popup with a big blue button to subscribe and a tiny "no thanks" in grey. I was looking for help here, but nothing worked, ccleaner ISN'T even in my windows startup list, but it's still appearing and advertising me .
I Will not be renewing this software because of this.
However If a moderator / administrator wants to offer me 5 years at $11.98 a year, ($60 total) without nagging me each year. Please feel free to message me.
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Well not quite. For customers who are not on autobilling it is quite reasonable to let them know in advance that they need to take some action to avoid having their service cut-off. To ensure that customers on autobilling are not at any disadvantage (such as yourself, as your subscription for CCleaner Professional Plus was due to be billed to your credit card in about a month), we periodically make offers available to renew at a lower price. For customers who forgot they they had a CCleaner subscription that they may not want to have billed for whatever reason, this also serves as an additional advance reminder to cancel prior to their upcoming billing date.
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For customers who do not wish to receive so many service notifications, back in 2020 we added an option under Options > Privacy > Offers that reduces their frequency. For example, the notification that you received this morning that the current offer was about to end would not have appeared for you, as a customer with automatic billing in place and a month still to go, if you had had that box unchecked.
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Dave, I'm afraid you are fighting a losing battle to attempt to justify all of the ADVERTISING you are doing on the screen while people are using your products! Clearly there is a problem if you just look at the comments! If you just ignore the comments and continue to post replies that argue contrary to how people actually feel then at some point you will no longer have a company because there will be a lot of people who will not renew with you because of all of these popups called advertising! You can try to dance around words and semantics as much as you want, but advertising is advertising no matter how it is packaged!
So, I think it is time to really start to listen to your customers and maybe email them vs put all this crap on the screen that just serves to annoy everyone!
Until you learn to listen to your customers better you will be doomed to eventual failure!
Why do they waste their time complainging? just ignore it and move on, the same as with any other advertising.
ALL PRODUCTS ADVERTISE, everything you own, everything you use, everything you eat or drink, it all has advertising.
It's entirely your choice if you use a particuar product or not, and why.
However you stop using every product that advertises, just because it advertises, then you are soon going to be cold and hungry.
PS. Do you write a letter to the advertiser complaining about every piece of junk mail that comes to your house? Or every advert that you see on your TV? or even other advertising on your computer such as the stuff Microsoft bombards you with or the advertising in your browser.
No, I thought not, just ignore ALL advertising and move on.
It may not be technically adverts if everything in CCleaner that's possible to disable it, but pop-ups in general coming from software will anger allot of people, especially if it's from a disk cleaning tool that would normally not announce its presence at all if not opened directly by the user.
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Why do people get so upset about advertising?
Why do they waste their time complainging? just ignore it and move on, the same as with any other advertising.
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ALL PRODUCTS ADVERTISE, everything you own, everything you use, everything you eat or drink, it all has advertising.
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<strong>It's entirely your choice if you use a particuar product or not, and why.</strong>
However you stop using every product that advertises, just because it advertises, then you are soon going to be cold and hungry.
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PS. Do you write a letter to the advertiser complaining about every piece of junk mail that comes to your house? Or every advert that you see on your TV? or even other advertising on your computer such as the stuff Microsoft bombards you with or the advertising in your browser.
No, I thought not, just ignore ALL advertising and move on.
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For a bit of fun: <a href="https://thecomplainingcow.co.uk/10-types-of-complainer-which-are-you/" rel="external nofollow">https://thecomplainingcow.co.uk/10-types-of-complainer-which-are-you/</a>
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cause when I’m using this computer as a media center and I’ve already paid for the software, I don’t need it to pop up while I’m watching tv or working on a project,
in what reality should I not complain about this when this software can’t even advertise to me in the right scaling on a 4k panel, can barely read anything it says, and can’t close it properly cause it’s an adjusted / modified task window.
Blatantly stupid. Seems a lot of paying customers that have been here for years are tired of it and moving on.
I don’t get any pop ups from Microsoft asking me to anything besides security related information. I don’t get any pop up’s on the web anymore because of an Adblock dns server I am running.
the only pop up I ever see is ccleaner, and even if I wanted to eliminate it with a power shell script or group policy gpo, I can’t because it would break the software.
i will move on, this is clear no one cares, will pay for a different product somewhere else, thanks.
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Humorous photo, a small advertising popup shown 'interruping' - err, some full screen advertising.
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i hope that was intended as a pun?
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if not then it's pretty ironic.
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Well at least I can close it properly. And if it was a headless desktop, which it is, and forces programs out of full screen mode to do its overlay, again which you can’t even see. yea this is pretty ironic.
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Why do people get so upset about advertising?
Why do they waste their time complainging? just ignore it and move on, the same as with any other advertising.
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ALL PRODUCTS ADVERTISE, everything you own, everything you use, everything you eat or drink, it all has advertising.
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<strong>It's entirely your choice if you use a particuar product or not, and why.</strong>
However you stop using every product that advertises, just because it advertises, then you are soon going to be cold and hungry.
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PS. Do you write a letter to the advertiser complaining about every piece of junk mail that comes to your house? Or every advert that you see on your TV? or even other advertising on your computer such as the stuff Microsoft bombards you with or the advertising in your browser.
No, I thought not, just ignore ALL advertising and move on.
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For a bit of fun: <a href="https://thecomplainingcow.co.uk/10-types-of-complainer-which-are-you/" rel="external nofollow">https://thecomplainingcow.co.uk/10-types-of-complainer-which-are-you/</a>
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Hmm? I guess you havn't actually been reading all of the complaints in close detail on this thread ??!!?? If your product is truly impotyant to you I suggest that you should to see what others are saying as well! It just seems as though you are going out of your way NOT to listen !! ...... So, let's try this one more time.... If my license is going to expire soon, then give me a reminder WHEN I OPEN THE PROGRAM ... but as others have said, the issue is when you have those annoying popup boxes come up throughout the entire time you are using the software and it is up and running and you have to stop what you are doing to close it before you can move on! THAT my friend is what people object to!
But, to constantly disrupt people as they are trying to use your product the entire time the software is loaded and for you to not listen to and respond in a positive way and acknowledge people's concerns and to make statements like you did about why people get so upset about advertising is evidence of a true disconnect between the software producer and it's customers, and that is why I stated that by continuing to do this will eventually leave you without a company! Ignore your customers at your own peril!
But, once again, you are fighting a losing battle to try to convince anyone here who has expressed themselves with a legitimate concern that continuing to do this with these popups should be OK and we should just all, "Shut up, sit down and enjoy the damn software!"... is that what you want?
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If your product is truly impotyant to you ...
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... you are fighting a losing battle
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.. is that what you want?
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You appear to be under the mistaken belief that I am an employee of Piriform/CCleaner.
I am a user and my opinions are given as a user.
Personally I don't care if anyone wants to use CCleaner or not.
That's entirely your choice.
I came here and remain here to try and help other users where I can with problems they may be having, not arguments about adverts.
Probably the best course of action is to not allow CCleaner to run on startup sitting resident in the background. It kind of defeats the aspect of paying for it doing that however since it's annoying people with pop-ups that's a solution to look into.
Then only use it as a free user would which is on-demand, and that way it will only run when the user has actually started it manually, and when done cleaning and exiting its essentially off again.
For those of us who purchased the software and have a valid, active license, give us an option to actually disable these annoying notifications?
And yes, I've unchecked everything under "Privacy". This is the main reason I cancelled my renewal. I've paid for my ad-ware, and I'm still seeing ads?
I did not have time to read through all of this thread but FORCING PEOPLE TO REGISTER TO GET THE COOKIES.TXT IS BULL CRAP!
After sign up/in I couldn't sign back in because my username isn't correct the way I typed it "Technomage Awunes", I hope when I post this to be able to see my own user name so I can sign in via the correct google profile to save the password but if I can't I then hope I can delete my account data from your system.
The new owners of ccleaner are CRAP.
If I get any more pop-up's, ad's or annoying notifications I WILL BE ENDING MY USE OF IT!
Edit: I found the issue with my account sign in - Awunes vs Awuens ... Got to typing too fast ... That's on me.
Edit2: Found that one can delete one's account data in the Account Settings > Security and Privacy