Is there a way to turn off recommendations in the BD dashboard?

Thepipe

I find the recommendations in BitDefender's dashboard very annoying. After setting up the program and choosing what I want to use, I have no desire to see recommendations for functions (VPN, Password Manager, etc.) I've already decided not to use. In addition to being annoying, they're a waste of space. Is there anyway to turn these off or hide them? If not, please consider this my suggestion for a future update.

Gjoksi

Hello.

That feature is called Autopilot.

"To offer you an effective operation and increased protection while carrying out different activities, Bitdefender Autopilot will act as your personal security advisor. Depending on the activity you perform, either you work, make online payments, watch movies, or play games Bitdefender Autopilot will come up with contextual recommendations based on your device usage and needs. The proposed recommendations may also be related to actions that you need to perform to keep your product working at its full capacity. To start using a suggested feature or make improvements into your product, click the corresponding button."

You can't disable or hide that feature and the recommendations you see in the program.

Regards.

Alexandru_BD

Hello @Thepipe and welcome back to the Community. 🙂

For many years, Bitdefender's Autopilot mode quietly handled security issues without any user intervention. Currently, Autopilot takes a more visible role. The aim is to make sure you get the full benefit of its many features. Autopilot might also suggest that you explore the Password Manager or that you check the privacy of your online accounts. If these recommendations are of no interest to you, simply ignore them and carry on. The section is purposefully integrated to streamline the user experience, so it doesn't return unnecessary pop-up messages that may steal focus, since its purpose is to make security and usage recommendations and not necessary to alert you about imminent threats.

As an insight, I can tell you that the first quarter of 2024 will bring some notable adjustments to this section, namely dismissable autopilot recommendations from the interface, with better transitions between them and confirmation feedback (also an animation) on the positive 'call to action' button. These are of course the result of customer feedback.

Best regards and Happy New Year!

Alex

Thepipe

Thanks Alexandru_BD. Apologies for the long reply, but I found numerous instances where the Auto Pilot "feature" definitely needs improvement. I look forward to any "adjustments" slated for Q1 of 2024 and hope they will address some, if not all of the items I've noted below. HNY to you too!

1 - In the case of all suggestions, there is a link below the text that says, "Show more details." Clicking this does nothing more than dim the lower portion of the window and expand the AP section slightly to show 1 or 2 additional lines of text that were truncated - see attached gif image. Unfortunately, the animation doesn't show when viewed here.

This seems like clumsy UI design. The amount of text shown in the AP recommendations never seems to be more than 4 or 5 line, so why not just make the recommendation text scrollable? Better yet, why not make the program window slightly larger to accommodate ALL the text? Making the program window slightly larger should not be a problem - especially since it never fills the entire screen. In fact, it only uses about 1/3 of the screen - on my 17" laptop, anyway. The BD program window could easily be made say 20% taller and still easily fit on smaller screens. It's as though the developers are obsessed with making things fit within a very small space, for no reason. Compact design can be a good thing, but it should not be at the expense of functionality or usability.

2 - AP suggests I use a password manager. This recommendation is useless to me since I already use a password manager that I'm happy with and have been using for many years. Windows is able to detect that I'm using a password manager. Why can't BD?

Out of curiosity, I clicked "Learn More" button to the right of the recommendation. It showed me what is essentially an ad for the BD password manager. This is therefore more of an effort to sell me something than provide me with useful information. Granted, it may be of use to those not using a password manager. But if BD could detect that I already use a password manager, there would be no need to show this.

3 - AP tells me that updates are available and that I should download them. If the updates are so important, why doesn't BD do download/install them automatically?

4 - AP suggests that a manual scan be performed. This is fine, but seems unnecessary if BD is supposed to be actively monitoring my system to protect against "ALL" threats, as it claims. At the very least, BD should perform scans automatically and/or allow me to schedule scans. In either case, it should alert me ONLY if threats/issues are found.

5 - AP tells me that it has detected a change in my system settings that may compromise my device. When I click the View Details button, it doesn't show me any details. Instead, it starts a scan. When the scan finishes, it says, "Your device is safe. No vulnerabilities were found" Again, why doesn't BD perform this scan automatically and alert me ONLY if issues are found?

6 - AP tells me it has detected vulnerabilities. When I click the View Details button, again it doesn't show me any details, but starts yet another scan. When the scan is finished, it says, "No vulnerabilities were detected." Yet again, why doesn't BD perform this scan automatically and ONLY alert me when vulnerabilities are detected?

Why would BD tell me there were vulnerabilities, when there were none? Presenting users with contradictory information such as this seems confusing/crazy to me. It also suggest the program is unable to actively provide current/accurate info.

7 - AP provides a recommendation regarding file shredding. I don't know about most users, but personally, I don't need to be reminded of this all the time. I understand the risks posed by sensitive files that are not "shredded", but this seems like more of a nag. I suppose some less than astute users may need nagging reminders like this, but the program should provide more capable users with an option to turn specific reminders/functions off.

8 - AP provides a recommendation regarding automatic profiles. I don't use these and should not have to see this every time I open BD. Again, users should have the option to turn off this and other recommendations that do not apply to them.

9 - AP shows a scan recommendation. When I click the Start scan button, BD thinks it is the first time scanning my system. This is NOT the case. Why doesn't BD recognize this?

Alexandru_BD

Hello @Thepipe and thank you for taking the time to write your feedback on the forum.

As the list of questions is quite comprehensive, it took me a while to come up with the relevant answers, so here it goes:

1. Scrolling in a small space is not usually a good idea, it may become difficult to read the information there, and a larger UI won't look good on lower resolution, especially since it's not resizable, but I think it's an idea to take into account for future redesign sprints.
2. There are numerous password managers for Windows, I don't think Bitdefender would be able to detect everything that customers use (without continuous updates designed specifically for this).
3. The antivirus software updates itself. That recommendation is just in case the user doesn't go through with it, maybe the user stops the update (there is no permanently off option, but you can, for example, stop until restart and then don't restart the computer for a number of days), maybe the user has the computer turned off, and so on. It is designed this way with a purpose in mind.
4. Full scans are recommended for (at least) 2 cases: a) the device was infected with malware before installing Bitdefender, which may not be active, but the files are there somewhere. b) a detection appeared on some files that did not exist before, and those files are again not executed to be caught by real-time protection (which only scans what is executed). So, I would say that it is quite an important recommendation. There is also the option to schedule scans in Protection -> Antivirus. Also, I wouldn't call the recommendation in the interface an "alert". There is also the scenario where the user connects an external drive (usb/ssd).
5. As far as I know, the vulnerability recommendations appear precisely because scans are performed in the background. It rescans because it's possible for the issues to disappear between scans. Besides that, the scans made through recommendations are faster, because they only check that the issue from the recommendation is still valid (that's why I would say that it is possible that they won't even find a problem on the second scan).
6. Related to 5.
7. In a future update (scheduled for this month, actually), the developers will add "not now" buttons, so after "not now" is displayed and clicked upon, the window will no longer display the respective recommendations. So this should be improved soon.
8. This point is related to 7, so the upcoming changes will include this.
9. The recommendation in this case refers to the system scan. If a system scan has not been performed on the respective OS until that moment, when run it will display the message "your first System Scan is about to start". IF you mean the first scan window is displayed to you every time you run the scan from the recommendation, then I don't exclude a bug, but to know for sure, this has to be reported to the Support teams, so they can get logs from the device and investigate further.

I hope the information is useful. I appreciate you took the time to share your observations with us.

Regards,

Alex