Report Utility breaches security

Dear folks,

I just ran the Acronis report utility to report a TI problem to tech support and was most distressed to discover that the report utility reports the actual CONTENTS of my hard drives (file and directory names at the root level), as well as configuration and system information. That's an invasion of my privacy and, when I'm working on sensitive materials, a breach of business security.

This is, to use a technical term-of-art, a "very bad thing."

I've emailed Tech Support directly about this; hopefully they will quickly revise the utility so that it doesn't collect this information. In the meantime I wanted to warn folks of this problem.

pax / Ctein

 

Please explain how Acronis can investigate a problem without looking at the system configuration and file format structure.

 

Dear Tachyon,

The "system configuration and file format structure" are not the same thing as the actual CONTENTS! Report Utility tells Acronis the NAMES of the files and directories on my drives. That information is almost never necessary to diagnosing a problem and it is a bad breach of security.

Run Report utility and look at the report; you'll see that it does an excellent job of creating a detailed report of the "the system configuration and file format structure" that is separate from listing the contents of each drive.

pax / Ctein

 

Can you edit the report and remove the Content listing. I agree it is no business of theirs to record the Contents of your drive other than what Acronis items there are.

 

Dear Chutsman,

I just received a reply from Achronis tech support saying it would be OK with them to cut out that info from the end of the file. They don't seem to understand, though, that the default should be to not collect it in the first case.

I mentioned this over dinner to a friend who works in tech support for, as she puts it, the "Evil Empire" and her reaction was , "Good Grief, even *WE* know better than to collect that kind of information without a very good specific reason!"

I mean, if Microsoft can figure it out... <vbg>!

OTOH there's always Sony... <ebvbg>

pax / Ctein

 

Hello Ctein,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please be aware that Acronis System Report contains only that sort information which might become necessary for the investigation of this or that problem. It was specially designed and does not include any useless data.

Please also note that in many cases we do need to know the contents of the root folder. For example, to find out whether there is a boot.ini or some other system file or BOOTWIZ folder which is used by Acronis OS Selector, ect.

In case you consider some of this information as private, please feel free to remove it from the report and notify the respective support engineer about this.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov