Hi folks Thought I would jot down my thoughts on using CCleaner with Vista as a way of protecting your privacy.
Firstly people need to think about what applications they have installed. For me, CCleaner does not effectively manage my privacy by default. For example, QuickPar keeps detailed information and caching data on all parity events with binaries I have gotten off Usenet. You need to conduct an audit of what software you use and the compare that to what CCleaner knows about.
The file winapp.ini is what CCleaner uses to know about what things to clean. There is a community add on available in this thread:
http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=1110
What this does is add a seconday file named winapp2.ini that instructs CCleaner to know about cleaning many more things. You can open both ini files to understand what CCleaner is cleaning at a detailed level.
Even with winapp2.ini in my case I still have applications that could be privacy problems that arent cleaned. For example, open office version 2.2 is installed and is not cleaned. This requires a custom entry into winapp2.ini. It isnt that hard to do. Another thing to note here is that any update to CCleaner have to be considered next to elements in winapp2.ini - if CCleaner adds stuff you need to review the contents of winapp2.ini.
You have to manage the configuration of this stuff. Sadly, the community has not been very good with helping the devs with the ongoing task of keeping the ini files up to date. For example, Google Earth in its current release is not detected by CCleaner because the registry key its trying to detect (Detect=HKLM\SOFTWARE\Google\Google Earth Plus) does not exist on a google earth free edition install. This is a real problem in my view and I would recommend that Mr G considers appointing some community leaders to help keep track of this stuff. For effectivly managing privacy and being able to rely on CCleaner it is fundamentally important the ini files are up to date and use the correct methods to identify and clean things.
Now that your audit is done, CCleaner does not actually delete things in a secure mode by default. They can be recovered by various methods even though youve just "cleaned" them. In CCleaner under options I set the secure deletion method to NSA, which overwrites the entries seven times using a method approved by the NSA. This used to have terrible performance but happily the new beta version fixes it.
I also choose to set in the advanced options to untick not deleting temp file stuff less than 48 hours old. Lots of things write stuff here that could be privacy problems and I when I run CCleaner, I want to be confident thats it, Ive cleaned. Not some half baked clean.
Vista has a new type of volume shadow copy that could be a privacy problem. If a system restore point was taken, which is enabled by default, it is possible that things in there are privacy issues. Even though you may delete it later on, its still recoverable using a variety of methods. I disable this feature of Vista and live with the rare chance I cant rollback some unwanted change myself. Vista has some good recovery tools anyway that can bring an apparently dead install back to life.
CCleaner appears not to clean the new way vista deals with thumbnails either. More info here http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/73720-thumbnail-cache.html
Another thing is that CCleaner needs to run as administrator. If you run it under your user context what Vista will do is prevent access to things that should be cleaned. Youll fall into a false sense of being cleaned cos you run cleaner, and think all is well. An interesting thing to do is immediately close CCleaner, run as admin, then clean again and see all the other stuff now purged.
I always run CCleaner with no other active user apps so I dont run into file lock problems with open programs.
EDIT: Oh and I forgot to add that NTFS has some new features one of them is transactional like file records. So be aware that if your a business, that a court could order for example to find out what times you accessed a certain document to use in a matter against you.
ciao