It tells me there are thousands of trackers on my computer, but only deletes a few - why is that? are the companies behind the trackers paying CCleaner now to "bypass" their trackers? If so, and the product is now compromised, then why am I paying for it?
The first thing to say is that what Health Check calls "Trackers" is not what you are thinKing they are.
They are generally just cookies.
Click this to read about what they actually are:
Having noted that - I see what you are saying about your cleaning results.
But did you run Health Check again after that result to see what it found when run again?
As most "Trackers" are actually cookies then something to note here is that Health Check recently changed how it can handle tracking cookies.
Which may explain why what is happening for you has changed.
Health Check now has a ‘Cookie Allowlist’ which will leave some cookies on your machine untouched, - it didn’t have/do that in the past.
(PS. it uses the same list as 'Cookies to Keep' in Custom Clean).
If you have set any 'Cookies to Allow' (or already had some as 'Cookies to Keep' in Custom Clean) then a Health Check scan will still report them as found and will count them in the number 'to remove'.
But when you click 'Make it better' it won't remove them because 'Cookies to Allow' tells it not to.
If you set the 'Cookie Allowlist' in Health Check then it will set a wildcard and allow all cookies on a particular website.
So just one wildcard entry in that list could mean that hundreds of cookies get 'Allowed' and so not cleaned.
After a Health Check scan click on the 'Privacy' box where it shows the number found to remove and a new page will open like this:
Click 'Manage allowed websites' and you get:
I'm only showing 2 cookies there but I suspect that you will have a long list, and/or names with '*' wildcards in them.
If it is on that list, or that matches a wildcard, then 'Make it better' will not remove but will leave alone.
Note in particular that first one - it has a wildcard and so any cookies at all that end with <em>.youtube.com</em> will be left alone and not cleaned.
You can clik that little bin icon to remove them from the list so that CCleaner will then clean them.