TuneUp is a tool that you run alongside iTunes. It cleans up tracks and is general maintenance for those of us that still buy tracks outside of iTunes. I’ve been a customer since 2009.
I sent some pretty harsh words to the TuneUp Support team today. I’ve been a yearly customer of their product for a while and I’ve at least spent $100, maybe more on TuneUp since 2009. I like the product and was disappointed when iTunes 12 + Yosemite was released that the tool no longer worked and that was after buying a lifetime membership (again) since it’s tied to a computer’s serial number. Yeah, that’s right it’s annoying but I had already come to terms with that a while ago. The issue with TuneUp 4.2 was that it simply didn’t work with the Apple updates released in October. I waited patiently for a fix.
In the middle of December, TuneUp released version 2.5. I upgraded and it did something strange. During the install process, the prompt came up asking if I wanted to allow TuneUp to access Safari Preferences. I allowed it blindly and Safari restarted. I started using TuneUp and the bugs found in 4.2 were indeed resolved.
When I went to do a search in Safari, Yahoo! was now my default search engine and new tabs / new windows opened the Yahoo homepage. I checked the preferences and they were modified and then I checked my Safari Extensions. There were 3 new extensions I had never installed:
Yahoo
Shopping Assistant
and one other.
Here’s a Windows user screenshot of the new EULA – https://twitter.com/wmalanw/status/546844904346091520/photo/1
It looks like TuneUp was sold earlier this year to a company called GMGP, LLC. This company bought the IP from a credit bureau or something like that for pennies on the dollar and now they are injecting crap into the application. This is horrible and very annoying because TuneUp isn’t free. Further, Mac users weren’t prompted to install the extra crap like PC users were so this is forcing me to install extensions and preference changes that I didn’t ask for. Really disappointing overall.
I suggest anyone thinking about using TuneUp with iTunes 12 to look elsewhere. There’s no telling how much stuff is collecting your information while the app is running.
Here’s a screen shot of the extensions installed in Chrome:
