[CCleaner Tip] Improve Privacy by Disabling Usage Data Collection and Reporting

If you use CCleaner software program in your computer, this article is very IMPORTANT for you.

CCleaner is one of the best and most famous system cleaning and optimization utilities available on Internet. It helps in getting extra free space on your hard disk drive by deleting unnecessary temporary files, browser cache, cookies, history files, etc. It also improves privacy by removing recently accessed documents, etc. It can also clean and optimize Windows Registry to help improve system performance.

Recently CCleaner released a new version labelled as version 5.45 which created so much controversy that CCleaner team had to pull the version from the servers and they stopped distributing the version. User complained about the usage data collection and telemetry feature introduced in the new version. The software was collecting usage data and sending the data to CCleaner servers and the worst part was that there was no option given to stop this behavior. Users were unable to opt out from this data reporting feature.

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Now CCleaner team has released another new version which comes with privacy improvements. Now the system monitoring feature has been divided into 2 separate fields and users are given an option to disable the usage data collection and reporting feature.

CCleaner claims that the data collected by CCleaner is anonymous and non-personal which is used to improve quality of the PC cleaning and utility services provided by the software program. The collected data includes operating system version, installed software versions (web browsers, antivirus, etc), country, system language, CCleaner edition (free or paid), basic interaction with CCleaner (views, button clicks, etc) and other such things.

If you are worried about this data collection and don’t want CCleaner to collect any data from your computer, you can stop it from doing this. You can block CCleaner from collecting and sending usage data to its servers by turning off a simple option in CCleaner settings.

Following steps will help you in disabling data collection and reporting feature in CCleaner:

1. Open CCleaner and click on Options tab.

2. Now click on Privacy section and disable i.e. uncheck the option “Help improve CCleaner by sending anonymous usage data“.

Disable_CCleaner_Data_Collection_Telemetry.png

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That’s it. Now CCleaner will stop collecting and sending usage data and statistics to its servers.

Also Check:

[Tip] Customize and Control CCleaner Automatic Updates Settings

[Tip] Disable Telemetry and Data Collection in Mozilla Firefox

[Tip] Disable Telemetry and Data Collection on Windows 7, 8 and 8.1

[Guide] Best Privacy Settings for Windows 10 to Disable Telemetry and Data Collection

Published in: Software

About the author: Vishal Gupta (also known as VG) has been awarded with Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award. He holds Masters degree in Computer Applications (MCA). He has written several tech articles for popular newspapers and magazines and has also appeared in tech shows on various TV channels.

Comments

NOTE: Older comments have been removed to reduce database overhead.

  1. Now click on Privacy section and disable i.e. uncheck the option

    That means it is checked by default and is collecting god knows what. People who don’t know this are in soup.

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