Is it intuitive to anyone that a third party web browser would be doing this by default?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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 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
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...
Nvidia is another culprit, Geforce Experience scans all your drives constantly to look for new games or something like that.