http://www.spywareinfo.com/newsletter/archives/march-2003/10.php
A California attorney has filed a class-action lawsuit against Intuit for deceptive trade
practices related to the secret bundling of SafeCast digital rights software. Macrovision's
SafeCast software protects the license for Intuit's TurboTax 2002 tax software. This software
was not disclosed to customers and is not removed when TurboTax is uninstalled. As a result of
the negative publicity, Intuit has started distributing an uninstaller. Unsurprisingly, the
uninstaller doesn't work.
Intuit and Macrovision both have been trying to deceive the public about this software. For
example, documents that were once available at Macrovision's web site which detailed the
abilities of SafeCast and contradicted statements made by Intuit started disappearing after I
started linking to and quoting from them. An investigation by extremetech found that Intuit's
claims that you could use the software on more than one computer in limited mode without
activation was a blatant lie. Without activating the software on additional machines using the
internet (or by calling Intuit on the phone), the software refuses to function at all.
Extremetech's investigation dispelled some rumors about SafeCast, and also confirmed others.
For instance, it was originally believed that the SafeCast technology installed by TurboTax was
spyware. Judging by the documents formerly available at Macrovision's web site (which have now
all vanished), SafeCast's abilities would technically make it spyware by giving publishers the
ability to "gather valuable data about [their] customer base". Each publisher who uses SafeCast
can decide which features to use and which not to use. The investigation shows that Intuit
probably did not enable the features which would have allowed it to gather information about
their users. This means that TurboTax is probably not installing spyware.
Another rumor which made the rounds was that SafeCast was writing to hidden sectors of the hard
drive not normally used by Windows. As it turns out, this is not rumor, it is fact. Extremetech
found that SafeCast was reading and writing to a hidden sector of the hard drive. It is the
same area of the hard drive that boot sector viruses infect. This is apparently where the
license information is being stored. This is a very unsafe area to store that information, and
there are reports of it causing problems with other copy-protected software.
There were rumors that SafeCast would interfere with cd burner drives after TurboTax was
installed. I've had several reports of people who say that after installing TurboTax, their cd
burners malfunctioned while SafeCast was running in memory. Terminating the SafeCast process
cleared up the problem.
Extremetech did not find any of these problems, and even speculated that these reports may be
from people mixing up SafeCast with SafeDisk. SafeDisk, also by Macrovision, does interfere
with cd burning. SafeDisk overwrites legitimate driver and system files with its own files that
disable the burners in certain circumstances and also monitors how you are using the burner.
My advice is don't use TurboTax at all, spyware or no spyware. Maybe next year the feature that
gathers demographics will be enabled. Intuit has lost whatever trust they may have once had
with their customers and there has been a mass migration to less intrusive software made by
less insulting companies. The two main alternatives are TaxAct (which I would recommend) and
TaxCut (which has a horrible privacy statement). One reviewer at Amazon.com summed up the
feelings toward Intuit quite nicely when he said "After all, if they don't trust us with their
software, why should we trust them with our taxes?"
