'We reserve the right to store and use the information collected by our software and to share such information among the Avast Group to improve our current and future products and services, to help us develop new products and services, and to better understand the behavior of our users.'Īvast Promises to Fix CCleaner Privacy Issues We may publish or share that information with third parties that are not part of the Avast Group, but we will only ever do so after anonymizing the data,' CCleaner's privacy policy says. 'We reserve the right to store and use the information collected by our software. Moreover, CCleaner's privacy policy also says that it can share collected information with 3rd party companies. Though the information CCleaner gathers is entirely anonymous, users on various internet forums expressed their concerns about Avast data sharing practice, saying that the company ruined their favorite tool after acquiring it. When asked about it on its forum, CCleaner said heartbeat sends only 'non-personal, absolutely non-identifiable usage information to improve CCleaner.' In its changelog for CCleaner 5.45, Avast notes it 'added more detailed reporting for bug fixes and product improvements.'īesides this, CCleaner now also sends a heartbeat every 12 hours which reports up-to-date usage statistics to Avast, allowing the company to faster deliver bug fixes and product improvements. What's concerning is that even after turning off the Active Monitoring feature from CCleaner's menus, it turns back ON automatically whenever users reboot their computer or close the software. These monitoring elements of CCleaner send user data such as anonymous system usage data back to the company's servers, as well as continuously scan systems to inform users when it comes across any junk or browser file, as first reported by Techdows.

CCleaner 5.45 released in July-forces Active Monitoring and heartbeat features.

CCleaner 5.44 released in June-adds pop-up advertisements.CCleaner 5.43 released in May-removes the option to opt out of data-sharing feature for users of the free software version.

This time the system cleaning software is in headlines due to 'monitoring and data collection' features Avast added in past few months to your favorite system optimizer application.

Ccleaner piriform 5.44