[thomasareed]

I'm extremely leery of MalwareBytes since they came out with the nagware/commercial version.

Randy, I'm not sure I understand this criticism. It's perfectly easy to continue to use Malwarebytes for free without hassles. It's a supported use case, and not one that we have any intention of ever changing.

and do a search for "MalwareBytes" on your Mac if you have MalwareBytes installed. You will find as many as 24 files (the number, oddly, varies for each user) for MalwareBytes installed all over your system. What do you think that they are all doing? I'd use EasyFind to delete all traces of MalwareBytes from your system.

I can easily tell you what they're doing, if you had asked.

You make this sound so nefarious. Why? If I use EasyFind to search for "1Password" on my system, I find 89 items. Is there something nefarious about that? No. Most of these files found with EasyFind are not "doing" anything, much less anything unwanted.

For others reading, if you have Malwarebytes installed and you decide to remove it, please don't do it this way. This is nothing against EasyFind, which is an excellent tool for finding things... but it is absolutely NOT the right tool for uninstalling software. Instead, use the Malwarebytes uninstaller, which will properly remove everything, ensuring that any actively running Malwarebytes processes are terminated without requiring a restart.

The uninstaller is very easy to use... just open the app and choose Uninstall Malwarebytes from the Help menu. You will need to enter an admin password to allow this, but you would need to enter an admin password to remove some of the files regardless how you do it, and that password is only seen by macOS, as part of the macOS authentication process, not by Malwarebytes.

 

[thomasareed]

Well...hmmm...think about it. You're using a free utility. So they aren't making money from you paying for the utility. How might they be making their money? Might it be the same way that Google makes their money from their free utilities? Might those 24 files be doing something like...spying on you?

No. They are not. Randy, please stop this kind of nonsense. Malwarebytes absolutely does not sell or in any other way monetize data from users. You can easily read our privacy policy and find out what we're collecting and why, and as someone who hates data collection and strongly advocates against collection of anything we don't truly need, I can tell you there's nothing sneaky there. If we started doing the same things with data collection that Google and Facebook do, we'd lose large numbers of employees who strongly dislike those practices.

If anyone has questions about what any Malwarebytes file is doing, just ask. I'll answer.

If anyone has questions about what we do with data, just ask. I recently answered an inquiry about this sort of thing in great detail: telemetry. malwarebytes.com

One of the core tenets at Malwarebytes is "no nonsense." And you should know that I live by that, Randy, as we've known each other a long time. I will speak plainly if you just ask.

 

[thomasareed]

Thank you for your valid comments and welcome to ehMac.ca forums.

Thanks!

I find it quite interesting, or should I say frustrating if not hypocritical, why and how some "free" applications or utilities are labelled as trustworthy by some while other applications are not, with no qualifications included or added regardless of judgement.

And in the same breath by the same commenters, if a developer dares charge a few dollars for his utility, such commentators suggest there is another similar product available that is "free", making it supposedly a better choice being the implication.

Yeah, it's a catch-22. In order to make money, free products have to: 1) ask for donations (or something similar), 2) display advertising of some kind, or 3) monetize user data. Or, of course, 4) not make money. Some great folks make really great free tools out of the goodness of their hearts, without looking to earn any money from them, in the great spirit of the good old days of the internet, but that's more and more rare these days.

But in contrast, when I joined Malwarebytes and started working on a product that had paid-for features, some folks viewed that as "selling out." Making money became a bad thing, even though I was making money with AdwareMedic via donations. In reality, you can do way more with Malwarebytes for free than you could with AdwareMedic... and far more securely to boot. (I gave a talk recently where I used AdwareMedic as an example of what NOT to do, and how to use it to gain root privileges. Be glad I'm not the one writing the Malwarebytes code! )

Unfortunately, there are some players in the security industry that give the rest of it a bad name, and leads to increased willingness to believe the worst.

 

[thomasareed]

II thought that my concerns were clear, and they really have nothing to do with whether or not Malwarebytes is free. The free vs. pay argument sounds to be purposely obfuscating the issue that I was pointing out.

Randy, these were your own words, which I was addressing:

Randy B. Singer said:
Well...hmmm...think about it. You're using a free utility. So they aren't making money from you paying for the utility. How might they be making their money? Might it be the same way that Google makes their money from their free utilities? Might those 24 files be doing something like...spying on you?

You implied that, because we offer a free product, that we must be spying on you. These were your words, part of your argument, and I have every right to defend my product against such false claims.

The very fact that Malwarebytes has components that are running outside and separate from the main program itself, thus requiring a special uninstaller program to remove them, seems very disturbing to me.

Are you, perhaps, familiar with Zoom? Or maybe Adobe Photoshop? Maybe Microsoft Office? These are simply a few examples from among countless other apps that also have "components that are running outside and separate from the main program." This is far from unusual and is not, in and of itself, in any way disturbing. It is the way that countless third-party programs for macOS have worked for decades. Almost since the very earliest days of the Macintosh, in fact.

Malwarebytes stores files in standard macOS locations where such files are meant to be stored, unlike some other apps. And it provides an uninstaller that will clean up all of them, unlike some... Microsoft Office, for example.

In contrast, I could show you numerous malicious programs that don't do this. I can show you malicious apps that use login items completely included inside the app itself. Such login items run without the user's knowledge and have never been visible anywhere that the user could see them, until changes Apple has made to Ventura. Yet these are somehow safer than the files that Malwarebytes installs openly?

What exactly is your concern here, and why are you not leveling that same concern at Zoom, Adobe, Microsoft, and countless others? This begins to seem like axe-grinding rather than legitimate criticism. If you have something more concrete that is concerning you, let's hear it.

There are, of course, weasels who would invite someone like you here to argue over this, and speak out of both sides of their mouth. Other list members should take note of this.

So, wait a minute here... you're saying that someone who made me aware of the things you were saying about me and my product behind my back is a "weasel?" When I show up here to defend myself, you get mad, thinking that someone told me what you were saying, and then accuse me of lying? That's rich, Randy. I'm disappointed.

News flash: you're on the internet. Anyone can see what you're saying. If you don't want someone to see what you're writing, maybe you should think about not writing it on a public forum in the first place.