I’m a long time user of Glasswire and after watching closely in recent months I have some questions and concerns about data accuracy. In this post: The GW Score.
If you’re bored, check out the Antimalware Service Executable (any one of them) GW score information. Hover over the little blue i and you’ll likely see “48,852 of 96,670 Glasswire users have used Antimalware Service Executable in the past month.”
Right after Halloween I started watching that little box on both of my machines. Guess what? those numbers never seem to change. "48,852 of 96,670 … " both machines. Every time for about 40 days (likely longer.) I’ve attached two screen grabs … one from today (above) and the other mid November when I realized the numbers never changed.
Glasswire is an app that displays instant information about your network traffic, yet the GW Score seems to barf up static numbers that are at least a month old (for the Antimalwre app). I observed similar results for other programs on that page…
This begs the question: Just how useful is this column of data? It seems like a nice idea that as useful as a clock stuck showing the time as 12:05.
Since more than a month has gone by without any update to the data I decided it was time to inquire. Please explain in detail how the numbers are produced, loaded and updated on a user’s display panel.
In some ways I’m sorta happy with this discovery that the numbers seem stale. Static numbers should mean that Glasswire isn’t wasting your bandwidth constantly updating ‘accurate’ tallies for all the apps on your system every 10 seconds.
If accurate numbers were updated once a month I still fail to see the usefulness. Perhaps if you had six columns of data showing six months of ‘accurate’ numbers you might be able to spot a trend of users uninstalling a particular app. But, what does that even mean? One can’t conclude that its dangerous because users seem to be uninstalling it. A fluke could be to blame for a drop. So, even giving the GW Score six times as much data fails to bring value to the user and likely would only create one thing: confusion.
The GW Score was pitched with much fanfare and billed as a useful new data point. Pay for a subscription they said. We have many more useful ‘benefits’ waiting for those who pay. Really?
Perhaps I’m just not that intelligent and fail to comprehend it’s value. But, it certainly seems to be nothing more than a column of digital clutter that is as useful to Glasswire users as a room full of slightly used toilet paper benefits a hoarder you might see on a reality television series.
It’s forced digital hoarding by the glasswire management team. It’s the potato chip bag that says “bigger bag” on the outside, but only delivers more air on the inside of the package.
Yes, you can click to hide the GW Score and make it disappear from the screen. Gee, thanks. Thats like a real hoarder closing the door to the room of slightly used toilet paper that might come in handy some day.
I ask Glasswire’s management to explain how they personally use this column to benefit their online experience and convince me that what looks like junk to me has great value to users who can leverage the information to:
Please give three specific examples of real GW Scores that prevented something nasty from happening, or created a real benefit for user beyond making users feel feel warm and fuzzy inside simply because the GW Score column is on their screen.
RICK
GW score is a vertical source of forced digital hoarding. Next topic will be what I hope might be an easy solution to wipe the horizontal trash Glasswire forces on users. Its a solution that already exists … and you see it every time you open the program.
