Avast is not following best advertising practices for their products as far as CCleaner users are concerned, recently, CCleaner came bundled with Avast antivirus, now even worse, the latest CCleaner Free 5.44 version after upgrading from 5.43 is showing Summer Sale ad, that cant’be disabled or controlled by the user.
And they first made CCleaner free users part of data sharing with third-parties for analytics purposes which they can’t opt-out as the privacy setting was grayed out, after getting criticism from users they allowed to control that option. And now, read out, what’s incoming for CCleaner free version users.
CCleaner: Summer sale ad and more to follow
If you’ve updated to yesterday released CCleaner 5.44, you’ll receive a notification on Windows from taskbar to upgrade & save :’Summer Sale: Get 50% off!’, the notification goes away instantly. The good news is this is a one-time thing, it won’t be shown again to the user as the folks over at Piriform developed a dynamic messaging system to deliver messages related CCleaner Pro Update and CCleaner Product Tips.
Whenever you see an ad or popup like above, a cookie will be dropped on your computer and it will be whitelisted. This is the cookie we’re talking about: ipm-provider.ff.avast.com.
Warning: The CCleaner promotional messages or ads can get worse if you remove the above the cookie or cookies set by CCleaner on your computer, you can notice these cookies under ‘Cookies to Keep’ section in Options > Cookies. If you’ve freshly installed a CCleaner, ensure you find this cookie below in cookies on Computer and select Keep.
SEE: CCleaner’s Intelligent Scan for Cookies Explained
“Just be aware that if you clean these cookies you will see certain messages with much greater frequency than if the cookie was there. For this reason these cookies have been whitelisted by default. You can manage this in the ‘Cookies to Keep’ list of the Options > Cookies menu.”
If you’ve not found the ipm-provider.ff.avast.com. cookie on right pane, check *.avast.com, *.ccleaner.com, *.ccleanercloud.com and *.piriform are whitelisted under ‘cookies to keep’ pane.
As far as I can say you don’t need to do anything unless you’ve removed or cleaned CCleaner cookies intentionally.
And they said they’re going to use system extensively in future versions to tests for UI. We’re not sure they’ll stick to showing messages related to CCleaner UI, it can be a sales message like summer sale which pushed to us.
And the control is slowly and steadily going into the hands of Avast, which can update old CCleaner version automatically on its own.
So what’s your take on this? Will you make a jump to other junkware cleaners?
Illegal behaviour according to EU DSGVO. Hello Avast: Would you like to pay millions or billions of dollars as punishment because of that illegal data transfer and advertising? Stop that bullshit immediately!
CCleaner is dead for me after Avast bought it. Avast products nowadays are malware/adware. Apparently wasn’t enough being a poor antivirus, they had to become a virus themselves. Use Bleach Bit instead, open-source and no surprises.
Just uninstalled it. I’m playing with Bleachit now. Not as intuitive, but once I get it set, I think I’ll be much happier. CCleaner got to be a real NAG! Ha!