It has not been a good week for Piriform's PC cleaning tool CCleaner. With the release of CCleaner version 5.45, it was quickly discovered that the program's "Active Monitoring" component, which is utilized to send anonymous usage data back to Piriform, could no longer be disabled.
First discovered by Ghacks.net, users of version 5.45 discovered that unlike previous versions there was no privacy setting that allowed you to disable the sending of anonymous usage information to Piriform.
Even if you tried to disable Active Monitoring so that the usage data was not sent, it would be enabled again on the next restart.
"While you may go to Options > Monitoring to disable "Enable system monitoring" and "Enable Active Monitoring" there, you will notice that the monitoring turns itself on again on the next start" explained the Ghacks article.
To make matters worse, this new version of CCleaner would not terminate when you closed the Window, but would instead be minimized to the Windows tray and the icon provided no way to close the program. The only way to close CCleaner was to forcefully terminate it via Task Manager.
With a huge install base and the program promoting itself as offering "Privacy Protection", you can imagine the outcry that was unleashed over these new changes in the version 5.45 of CCleaner.
Due to this, in an announcement on their forums, Piriform has stated that they have pulled version v5.45 and made the the v5.44 the latest one available for download. They went on to say that they would be splitting the cleaning alerts and anonymous usage data into separate controls, with different settings for each, and provide the ability to easily terminate the program.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/ccleaner-v545-pulled-due-to-anger-over-usage-data-collection/
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