CCleaner 5.44 comes with advertising popups
If you run the free version of the popular temporary file cleaner and system tool CCleaner for Windows, you may have noticed that it has started to display advertising popups on the system.
I noticed the behavior after installing CCleaner 5.44 on a Windows 10 Pro system; it is possible, however, that older versions of CCleaner display the advertisement as well.
The advertisement appears as a popup message in the lower right corner of the screen. It highlights a Summer Sale and a discount for CCleaner Professional.
You can upgrade to the professional version of CCleaner for 50% off.
It reads:
Summer Sale: Get 50% off!
Treat your computer to automatic cleaning for a stress-free summer
The offer ends on July 7.
Note that the popup is displayed when you run the portable version or the version that gets installed on the system.
The popup message disappears after a few seconds but you can open the upgrade option in the CCleaner interface to display the offer again.
There you may notice that the 50% may not have been accurate. On my system, it displayed a discount of €10 from €24.95 to €14.95 which is less than 50%.
The reason why there is a discrepancy is that a click on the "upgrade & save" button opens a page on the CCleaner website. There you find the offer for €12.49 instead of $14.95.
It is rather strange that Piriform/Avast would display two different upgrade offers to users of the program. You can open the Summer Sale page directly here.
CCleaner Professional adds features such as priority customer support, automatic cleaning, and additional cleaning options to the application.
There is no option in the program to disable the advertising popup. In fact, there is no option at all to prevent this kind of behavior.
What you can do is block CCleaner's Internet access. If you disallow the program to connect to the Internet. for example with TinyWall or Windows Firewall Control, it seems that you won't get the advertising popup.
The one downside to this is that you will have to download new versions manually to install them, at least until the July 7 deadline is reached.
There is no telling, however, whether the popup won't be used to advertise other Avast products such as Avast antivirus products.
CCleaner has been in the news recently quite a bit. Avast acquired CCleaner's parent company Piriform in 2017, and servers were compromised in 2017 shortly after the acquisition. The company added privacy options to CCleaner in 2018 which caused initial confusion as well.
Closing Words
I have to admit that I don't mind reminders like the one that CCleaner displays. What I dislike about it is that there is no option to turn it off and that the popup is displayed frequently and not just once or on user request.
Users who dislike the practice may want to check out alternatives such as Bleachbit.
Now You: What is your take on this?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.