First post, by LSS10999
I did not realize this until I actually installed it on a system. The free edition (FE) of Alcohol 120% is not clean. If you need to use it, better install it on an isolated, and preferably air-gapped environment.
Simply put, Alcohol 120% FE contains an Adware functionality which you share your device resources and IP address (bandwidth?) to Brightdata for them to download stuffs. By agreeing to do so, you can set up 3 virtual drives instead of 1. The prompt showed up during the installation process, which caught me by surprise, as I did not anticipate something like this back then.
Of course I did not agree, but as nowadays it's very hard to trust when it comes to promises like "we'd never share your information to third parties..." as well as "we won't collect anything if you do not accept...", I'm considering that system compromised and will be reinstalling the system now that I'm done with it. That system is mostly new so nothing really sensitive was there anyway...
I haven't checked RE (Retro Edition, more meant for Win9x), as well as the Portable one... but I don't think I can trust them being really clean, either.
EDIT: In case you agreed to share resources during install, to disable, go to Options - General, and look for an option called "Share device resources (brightdata_com)". It took me a while to find where the option controlling the functionality is. However, I have no guarantee that switch alone will disable everything related to it if you've turned it on before.
Alcohol Soft doesn't appear to be transparent about this. Just searched around their official pages (as well as their download pages on Filefacts) and found not a single reference to Brightdata.
EDIT 2: Found some references to Brightdata buried deep inside EULA and Privacy Policy. So they're mentioning this in places few would read thoroughly instead of being open about it.
EDIT 3: Tried installing the RE and the portable one inside a XP VM. So far I haven't found any anomaly that could be easily spotted during install... Maybe it was due to the VM originally had no connectivity... so I installed network driver for the VM to further confirm... still nothing out of ordinary... I also read through the RE's license agreement and could not find any noticeable Brightdata-related line in it... maybe these variants are okay... but still, be careful when using it on a system connected to Internet regardless, as I did not run the VM for too long to check if there are any delayed triggers (such as those that won't activate until a few hours of system uptime).
