As if there aren’t enough spyware, backdoor and Trojan horse programs circulating on the Internet and invading computer systems around the world already, Intuit, the makers of the very popular income tax software program TurboTax ( compare prices), added a spyware program to the latest version of TurboTax.
This year marks the first year that Intuit included product activation á la Microsoft in their product. Once installed, the product must be activated before you are able to print or electronically file your return. It is possible, after the product has been activated, to install the software on a different PC, however you would need to purchase an additional activation code before you could actually print or file your tax return using the software.
While I find product activation to be quite inconvenient I do not fault companies for using it. Microsoft products and TurboTax are probably among the most “shared” software products out there. The company has a right to do what it can to protect its software from piracy. The initial activation is fairly quick and straight-forward. It gets tedious if you swap out your hard drive or switch to a new computer altogether. In general though it does not take much time to activate, does not impede the use of the product and helps the company to ensure consumers pay for their product rather than “borrowing” it from a friend.
Intuit crossed the line though. Not only did Intuit add product activation, they also included Macrovision’s Safecast / C-Dilla DRM (digital rights management) software. This wouldn’t be so bad if they had stated it, but they sort of snuck it in. C-Dilla disables the ability to copy the CD by monitoring CD writing activities at all times. This adds some processing overhead due to the fact that this software is constantly running in the background. There are reports that it has caused issues with other applications as well. It wasn’t until a few users noticed issues on their computers and discovered the application there that Intuit even admitted having included it.
There seems to be no easy way to remove the spyware either. After public furor about this sneaky tactic Intuit has created an uninstaller. The uninstaller can be retrieved through automatic Web update within the TurboTax program. Of course, a big caveat is that should a user actually choose to uninstall C-Dilla, they will also disable TurboTax. It has also been reported that uninstalling does not truly remove all aspects of the spyware and that some manual intervention may still be required.
In the end, I am sure that money will talk. If masses of users jump ship to competing products I think Intuit will take note and make some tweaks to their copy protection techniques for next year. I am a Quicken user and I have used TurboTax since its inception. I like Intuit products and have always found them very good at what they do. This year’s antics and some recent poor customer service from Intuit have led me to switch to TaxCut this year. We’ll see how things play out next year.
