is mackeeper safe on my systems as i have already downloaded and installed it

R C-R wrote:

I browsed through that ten page topic but I didn't see anything specifically about uninstall issues. In fact, most of it seemed to be about web page popups, popunders, & such.

Is there a particular post or date range you can direct me to in that topic that I might have overlooked?

Sorry you had to do that. The only post I wanted you to read was the one I linked to by FIXYOURTHINKING and was meant to counter one of the claims that the uninstaller was the root cause of the popups. I have to give him credit for not accepting what he was told about these popups (actually popunders) and made all the calls necessary to get to the truth (apparently), only to be told nothing could be done about it.

Those allogations started months before from numerous users, but the individual that stands out in my mind was Memoire, who posted to dozens of threads with a lot of passion about this during a period of Jul through Sep 2011. Examples can be found scattered throughout this six page rant starting here. If memory serves, users in this time frame were the primary source of contention that the uninstaller purposely left remnants which kept encouraging the user to reinstall.

I believe I even saw an admission, of sorts, by ZeoBIT that these ads were being served by an their advertising agency, but took no responsibility for them. Similar to their attempts to shift the blame on the phony competitor sites that were set up in the early days. I can personally attest to much of what I saw of that, but it will have to be a story for another day...

During the Flashback incident, I was very annoyed at the anti-virus companies that posted very complex command-line procedures for removing a really simple malware program. I've been using UNIX for decades and I don't know what some of those commands do. Obviously their goal was to make the process look much more difficult and scary than it really was.

During that period, I remember making a comment equating MacKeeper to Flashback. R C-R called me on that but I brushed it off because there were so many reports about how bad MacKeeper was. Well, at some point, something clicked. I remembered that one of the most popular anti-MacKeeper links was written by a well-known troll here in Apple Support Communities. I decided to revisit that and discovered it was the same thing the anti-virus companies were doing. So, I tried MacKeeper myself and discovered that the uninstaller worked fine and was even slick enough for me to think "hey, that's cool". MacKeeper is using FSEvents to watch the MacKeeper.app bundle. When the user puts the bundle in the trash, MacKeeper pop-ups and asks the user if they want to delete it. If so, it automatically removes its launch agent.

That is my MacKeeper story. I am never going to recommend it, primarily because of the anti-virus angle. Even without the anti-virus, I don't need the other utilties it provides. I'm not going to recommend anything I don't use. I don't even recommend all the things I do use. MacKeeper's headline of "security, cleaning, and optimization" are things that Mac users just don't need to worry about. But if people want to buy that sort of thing, it is their right.

I cannot verify any of these reports of shady businesses practices from Zeobit. As I have disproved some of them, I am disinclined to believe any of them. I have low opinions of a number of other, much larger, companies but I am not going to directly air my suspicions in public. I will do my best to say good things and refute misinformation about their competitors, such as Apple, instead.