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Comment by gigel82 | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of open source scripts and tools on GitHub for accomplishing the same goal (in various state of being out-of-date, abandoned, etc.); I started collecting the ones that appear somewhat active here: https://github.com/TemporalAgent7/awesome-windows-privacy

I plan on going through them to weed out duplicates and duds. You shouldn't trust any of those blindly, but definitely read through the code; I'm particularly interested in coming up with a list of services and scheduled tasks that can be safely disabled without impacting any of the applications and services I'm using (I want Windows Update, OneDrive, Office, Defender, Store and store apps, MS Account login and Xbox Gaming for example, which most tools want to disable).

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I noticed a media disk drive grinding away the other day, nothing made sense to be causing it. Turns out Chrome now scans all your drives and sends executables back to Google by default or something (software_reporter_tool.exe), even if you are a software developer in competition with them (practically all software developers since Google are essentially all-encompassing at this point).

Is it intuitive to anyone that a third party web browser would be doing this by default?

I have... noticed something similar to this too

I have a single remaining windows box that is completely idle with a rust disk and it's started spinning up for no apparent reason

how did you figure out it was Chrome?

edit: going to try procmon with the filter set to the disk

FWIW, I recently started building my own ungoogled chromium from here: https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium-win...

Someone might post a binary build there soon with 94 (until yesterday they only had the ancient 89), but you can build it yourself as well (on my 32-core 5950x with 64Gb RAM it took 2.5+ hours to build, just to be prepared for that).

Note that it won't have the Google Chrome Store, so the process for installing extensions (ahem, uBlock Origin) is a bit more involved: https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-wiki...

I think I just sorted standard windows task manager by disk% to find it.

Nvidia is another culprit, Geforce Experience scans all your drives constantly to look for new games or something like that.

If you're sure that's actually Google's application doing it, and can show it happening with clear evidence, then I recommend reporting it to the media and everyone else you can think of. That sort of behaviour is essentially espionage and I'm sure it would be enough to get Chrome banned from many places which were previously happy to use it.

I found this on it:

https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html#unwant...

> In addition, if you have opted in to automatically report details of possible security incidents to Google, Chrome will report information about unwanted software, including relevant file metadata and system settings linked to the unwanted software found on your computer.

I don't think I ever opted in to this but they may have have had tricky wording or I just didn't catch it. From searching around, there seems to be no way to opt out of the scan itself (not the submission) except denying read permissions to the software_reporter_tool.exe's folder. So if you have spinning drives that you want to keep idle when not in use, for power and longevity reasons, you are SOL without remembering each time you setup a machine.

From there, we get to https://www.google.com/about/unwanted-software-policy.html

which says

After installation, programs should not engage in deceptive or unexpected behavior. Some examples of deceptive or unexpected behavior include:[...]Preventing the user from controlling the software[...]The user must have a meaningful opportunity to review and approve any principal and significant updates or settings changes.

Disclosure is especially important if data collection is a non-obvious feature of the software.

Pure unadulterated hypocrisy. Not surprising coming from Google.

Also from https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/security/...

> Don't scare the user. Software must not misrepresent the state of the user's machine to the user, for example by claiming the system is in a critical security state or infected with viruses.

Yet Google Chrome continues to tell users that many harmless executables are malware even after they have been informed of the false positive many times.

Maybe they should prevent people from downloading Chrome instead.

It has done this for years. Its not new behavior. Also why I use Firefox and Comodo Firewall. I would remove all privs on the file in Windows to stop it. Deleting will only be temporary.

are there recommendations for a powerful Windows firewall that can be run locally? I have noticed there are DNS calls often resolving from my machine (via pihole), but my local firewall is oblivious to those connections and never alerts me to local application making those calls.

I can't find anything like that on my machine and am running the latest Chrome; where is that executable located on disk?

AppData/Local/Google/Chrome/User Data/SwReporter/[VERSION]/software_reporter_tool.exe

Thank you, found it. It looks like it's not a new thing, it's been around for at least 6 years; it's possible they recently expanded its scope to scan more of one's disk which would be unfortunate. Found some details here for how to disable it: https://www.ghacks.net/2018/01/20/how-to-block-the-chrome-so...

The gracious guess would be an attempt to detect malware by sending or fetching hashes to match.

I experienced this too. Thank god for having a noisy HDD or I never would have noticed.

I fixed it by replacing the software_reporter_tool.exe with a blank file named "software_reporter_tool.exe" and setting it to read-only.

It seems this is the same engine as ESET antivirus scanner:

>As applied in Chrome Cleanup, ESET’s technology is used by Google to alert users about unwanted or potentially harmful software attempting to get on users’ devices through stealth, for example, by being bundled into the download of legitimate software or content. Google Chrome, using ESET’s security technology, then provides users with the option to remove the unwanted software. Chrome Cleanup operates in the background, without visibility or interruptions to the user. It deletes the unwanted software and notifies the user once the cleanup has been successfully completed.

https://www.eset.com/int/about/newsroom/press-releases/compa...

I want similar, although I don't want oneDrive - the level of spying that's used for is unacceptable imho.

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