There would appear to be some misconceptions in this thread. For example:
11 hours ago, HGVord said:
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When they started a couple years ago with telemetry/data-collecting
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There has been some form of telemetry collected since December 2010, starting with licence activation counts. Despite persistent urban myths to the contrary, this has actually been actually wound back significantly after Avast showed up on the scene.
12 hours ago, HGVord said:
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I changed to the slim-version
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As @nukecad pointed out, that didn't make any difference, by the way.
12 hours ago, HGVord said:
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and blocked everything in the firewall
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The in-product telemetry data can be "blocked" more gracefully, and without breaking anything, by simply opting out through Options > Privacy in CCleaner 5.46 or higher. Since the telemetry only collects an aggregated tally count of how many users use what features, the best real world analogy would be voting. No-one knows who you vote for in an election or referendum - and if you choose not to vote then you have chosen to have your opinion ignored in favour of those who do.
CCleaner does not collect any personal information on our users, except for some minimal information required to maintain licence subscriptions for our paying customers. And we have never sold any customer data. (All other factors aside, this would only be of interest to our competitors, and we are generally disinclined to give them this sort of assistance.)
We have no use for your personal data, and under the various privacy laws that we are subject to, if we did collect and store it (y'know, just in case it might be useful later for something) then we are legally obliged to spend a lot of time and money to maintain it and look after it forever. With a user base larger than the population of most countries, that would be exceedingly tedious and burdensome - so we don't collect it at all. It would also look rather odd for a performance and privacy tool to do so.
For more information on all of this, you can refer to the CCleaner data fact sheet: https://www.ccleaner.com/about/data-factsheet
Under law you can, of course, request a copy of all of the data that CCleaner holds on you if you'd like to check it. To save you some time though:
2 hours ago, nukecad said:
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Would you block your cars cooling system (put a nosecone on to make your car more aerodynamic say) and then complain to the manufacturer that their engine was getting too hot?
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Exactly this. If you are blocking the web service components that CCleaner needs to operate (in the mistaken belief that you need to do so to block the telemetry that you have already switched off) then, yeah, you are going to have problems. The primary use-cases for a firewall or hosts file block of CCleaner are:
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A user with a pirated serial key who doesn't want a NACK signal back from the licence server.
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A user in North Korea trying to circumvent the trade sanctions geo-blocking.
... neither scenario we are particularly motivated to assist.
TL;DR: don't be this guy
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