Recently, I contacted Acronis to advise them that Comodo TrustToolbar was not malware, as reported in their Privacy Expert Suite 9 malware scan. They sent the following reply:
Hello Gordon,
Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.
From the Comodo privacy policy of: When downloading a Comodo product, such as the TrustToolbar Plug-in, you will be required to submit personal information as specified on the download page. This information will be used by Comodo to contact the customer about the services on our site for which they have expressed interest, including product updates and associated promotional material.
(http://www.trusttoolbar.com/corporate/privacy.html )
So this is spyware and Acronis Privacy Expert 9.0 Suite will detect it in future.
Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.
Firstly, I don’t work for Comodo, I’m just a satisfied user of their security products.
I’ve read a posting on the Comodo support forum that Acronis Privacy Expert Suite detects Comodo’s Trust Toolbar as spyware, and that it does this based on the Privacy Policy stated on the Trust Toolbar web site (paraphrased from the reply received from Acronis Support), rather than the operation and/or function of the toolbar itself.
The stated policy on the Trust Toolbar site says that to download the toolbar you will need to provide personally identifiable information that Comodo may use.
No identifiable information is required to download the toolbar, nor is it required to install the toolbar. It may have been required in the past, but it isn’t needed now.
A large number of spyware/malware vendors (Webroot Spysweeper is the latest) are withdrawing Trust Toolbar from their blacklists and PCWorld included it in its article on anti-phishing tools(http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,120501-page,1/article.html).
The toolbar does not transmit personally identifiable info when doing a site check, only the site details required to verify its authenticity.
Many thanks for taking this up with Acronis. I’ve emailed them several times about this matter, and have always received a similar response to the email quoted above. I hope they take action soon to remove Trust Toolbar from their database.
I have to say, although it IS COMODO, i think they should still have the right to detect any product that is installed without appropriate notice to the user, if COMODO, gives a LIST or some sort of option in the install process, that is fine.
Me for one DOES NOT want this toolbar, for stability reasons. And i don’t use Internet Explorer.
The current release of Turst Toolbar categorically does not install without user notification. In fact, the user has to download the setup file locally and then run it themselves. I fail to see how anybody could construe this as a “drive-by” install. Previous versions may have installed surreptitiously, but the current release doesn’t.
One thing I did notice, however, is that if you click “About”, it says it’s release “Distributor Version 1.00 Comodo Release”. I don’t know if this means that there may be other, rebranded versions that don’t play nice.
