CCleaner’s latest version, 5.45, collects anonymized information about your system, then basically makes it impossible for you to turn the feature off.

Give it a shot: head to Options > Monitoring, then disable “Active Monitoring.” Restart your computer and the feature will be enabled again. Sneaky, right? CCleaner, for their part, says all information gathered is entirely anonymous, and only used to help improve the program. They also say upcoming changes will give users more choice. Read their statement here.

This all might be true, but reverting settings like this after the user makes a choice still strikes us as sketchy.

CCleaner was long admired for being a reliable, free system cleaner without any gimmicks. We recommended it regularly, but that was a long time ago. These days when CCleaner isn’t being hacked to include malware it’s adding malwaresque features like this all on its own.

We could go on. It’s unfortunate, but happily software like CCleaner really isn’t really necessary in 2018. Our advice: uninstall CCleaner and forget about it. Thanks to Martin Brinkmann, writing for Ghacks, for pointing this latest problem out to us.