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CCleaner, developed by Piriform, is a utility program used to clean potentially unwanted files and invalid Windows Registry entries from a computer.
CCleaner is spyware that collects your personal information to advertise to you. It also sells your information to third parties so that they can advertise to you. It collects a huge amount of very personal information, like your physical location. CCleaner uses the technique of privacy policy obfuscation where it provides one privacy policy for every single product its company offers, making it more difficult to know what parts of the privacy policy apply to which program.
CCleaner clearly shows in its privacy settings that it is collecting information about your computer and selling that information to advertisers. Below is a screenshot on how to mitigate some of it.
If we look at the privacy policy, we can see that CCleaner reports the following:
Beyond this, CCleaner is integrated with the following spyware platforms, which all collect their own sets of information:
It would be very time-consuming to go through all of those privacy policies (especially because many of these are obfuscated), but it should be enough to understand that CCleaner is full of third party spyware, as well as first party spyware.
From the privacy policy:
"When we collect your email address, we may market our other products and services to you. You may choose to unsubscribe from future email marketing by following the instructions in the email."
According to the privacy policy, the CCleaner website tries to track your physical location.
"Our websites use cookies to acquire data that may be used to determine your physical location via your Internet Protocol address (“IP Address”) and automated geolocation techniques, or to acquire basic information about the computer, tablet, or mobile phone that you use to visit us."
"location data" is also mentioned when talking about the information that CCleaner itself collects about its users.
In the past, CCleaner has been compromised and backdoors have been added to it.
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Bleachbit is Tool to Clean Your System and Free Disk Space. Also, BleachBit can Shred Files.
BleachBit makes no unsolicited requests at all.
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PowerISO is a CD / DVD / BD image file processing tool.
The PowerISO software itself, after you have installed it, does not seem to have a lot of serious privacy problems and would probably be listed as "Not Spyware" or "Low". However, downloading and installing this software requires careful attention because it attempts to install several spyware programs and otherwise violates your privacy at every step of the installation process. So it's received this higher rating because of how bad this process is for user privacy. Also, keep in mind that this is for the free version of the software and the paid version might be slightly better for user privacy, however because there are so many problems with the free version you would have to do your own tests to make sure.
To talk more specifically about the software itself, it will check off "automatically check for updates" by default in the installer which is bad, but you can uncheck it. When I actually ran it after installing, it did not make any unsolicited requests so it didn't have any problems. When I asked it to check for updates, it used HTTP to talk to some server. HTTP is a little excessive and not good for privacy. But at least it doesn't phone home or anything, which is really not something I expected after seeing the absolute disregard for user privacy when trying to install the program.
Microsoft Network Monitor 3.4, ProcMon, and NoScript were used to check this program and it's installation process for spyware.
When you try to download this program off of the developer's website (http://www.poweriso.com/download.php), the download link, which appears to be a link to: "http://www.fettcedob-nero.com/vf6o1o5/PowerISO7-x64.exe", is actually a redirect to a website that tries to run a third party script (spyware) on your browser.
I could not manage to download this program with a Firefox-based browser, so I used a Chrome-Based browser to download it. Once I had enabled JavaScript and executed all of the spyware involved, it attempted to get me to install this Chrome extension:
While this is not a review of search manager, it's worth noting that this extension is known adware at least, and who knows what else it does. Any searches about this extension should explain this. But at the very least, assuming that you didn't install any spyware yet, you at least have the PowerISO installer...
Once you run the PowerISO installer, it will attempt to install the following programs on your computer
Which both look very shady. CDex also seems to be using this same tactic and installer software.
Now, to top it all off, the PowerISO installer will also phone home to some Amazon Servers
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CDex is an Open Source Digital Audio CD Extractor.
CDex's installer bundles it with spyware, and it will randomly suggest a spyware program to the user, with a chance to opt-out. Usually it attempts to bundle itself with the WebDiscover browser and one time I got it to try and offer me an antivirus program, but I wasn't able to reproduce this. The program was tested on Windows 7 32-bit with Microsoft Network Monitor 3.4 and Wireshark 2.6.2. The version of the program tested was 2.06. It did not make any connections to the internet that my tests were able to find. To test the program I ripped the audio files out of a CD with both network monitoring programs open.
CDex attempts to bundle itself with the WebDiscover web browser. This is an Opt-out and not an Opt-in like it should be. This program is spyware, because according to its privacy policy, it collects information about its users.
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Paint.NET is a freeware image editor program for Microsoft Windows.
Paint.NET contains some spyware features, but also claims in its privacy information to not be spyware.
It's impossible to build Paint.NET from source and read its source code to verify that it is not spyware. Therefore, it is impossible to prove that Paint.NET is not spyware.
Paint.NET contains an updater that downloads new version of Paint.NET. This updater also downloads a file from paint.net's website to check for new versions, which is a form of phoning home. (I didn't check what protocol or kind of request it makes, though) This can be disabled, however, and you should disable it. Paint.NET also will phone home when you install or update the software. So the only way to avoid this is to block the program from accessing the internet, and disabling all updates.
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