Turbo Tax problems

I’ve seen a few of these but not really had time to get into all the details until this morning. Here’s the scenario, Intuit is bundling a program called SafeCast from Macrovision with the latest release of TurboTax, according to this article Intuit is quoted as saying:

“It is not spyware, as some on the Internet are saying,” Gulbransen says. “We don’t collect any personally identifiable information at all, and we can’t look at the configuration of your hardware. The program doesn’t chew up system resources at all, and it can be uninstalled when you wish.”

Hmm, that sounds a little too nice in my book. How about what others are saying? That it shuts down your CD burner? How does it “thwart use of CD-recordable drives, re-mastering by professional pirates, and unauthorized Internet downloads” if it is not using up system resources and monitoring your PC’s configuration?

In the final analysis, at least as far as my PC is concerned, the last line quoted at the above privacyandspying article as being part of Macrovision’s ad campaign is the proof:

“Easy to implement, compatible with standard hardware configurations and transparent to the consumer. ”

Nothing being installed on my PC should be transparent to me. I should absolutely be given full disclosure of anything your software is going to install BEFORE I install it. Otherwise I’m going to be pissed off, and will have every right to be pissed off!

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