Daemon Tools is cataloging all your disc images, without permission

So after launching Daemon Tools Lite today, I noticed a new pane on the right labeled MountSpace. Turns out, it’s a cute little service that shows the top games and applications that folks are mounting and using in Daemon Tools. And to deliver that experience, Daemon Tools hashes every image you mount and sends it to MountSpace servers with or without permission. Combined with your IP address, and probably more, it doesn’t take a genius to realize this is a huge privacy issue.

Thinking I missed something, I went ahead and re-installed Daemon Tools. Sure enough, a MountSpace related dialog appears.

DAEMON Tools mount statistics dialog

Several problems:

  1. The Daemon Tools Lite EULA only mentions the word “privacy” twice, both in irrelevant contexts. In fact, the EULA appears truncated.
  2. Selecting “Don’t allow MountSpace to use my mount statistics” here doesn’t actually turn off MountSpace.
  3. MountSpace doesn’t have a real privacy policy.

While MountSpace could argue that selecting the latter option here would simply flag your data for deletion server-side, there’s no way to validate they’ll actually follow through. So as a workaround, I recommend everyone block 212.117.184.51 and 212.117.185.149 in their firewalls, until the matter is clarified. Windows 8’s native ISO mounting couldn’t come quicker.

You can find already sent/received cached data in %AppData%\DAEMON Tools Lite\ImageInfoCache.

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Update: A Daemon Tools administrator claims my information is false in their forums. I tried explaining but my post on their forum was delayed, then edited down. I queued up a reply, just waiting to get through the moderation queue again.

Also, popular German magazine CHIP picked up on the post. Of course, they didn’t attribute me at all.