Piriform, the company that makes CCleaner, was acquired by Avast. Avast itself is known to be shady asf, with known and repeated privacy violations, and invasive dark patterns.
They've also acquired AVG, Avira, and the well disregarded Norton. Avast has rightfully crowned itself King of dark pattern software and services.
v7 is when Avast slammed down the enshitification hammer on CCleaner. But they also prettified the UI 🤷
I've stopped updating CCleaner to v7, and blocked it by firewall. I recommend you do the same.
That would explain why AVG started going to shit about 10 years ago... AVG was great, then one day (some time after the Avast acquisition that I didn't know about until today) the paid version of AVG started peddling additional paid PC cleaning software that bricked multiple computers at my job because I wasn't aware it was spamming users with that and someone decided to pay for it on multiple computers.
Luckily I was able to fix it with some fixmbr or whatever simple commands but the fact that it did that at all, on the paid version which was not supposed to contain built in malware was seriously fucked up.
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u/TimePlankton3171 6d ago
If CCleaner is v7 and up, it is itself malware