Bitdefender should respect user instruction to eject media by stopping scan of external drive

I guess a lot of victims of viruses "know" what's on their disks, "know" what's attached to the emails they've received, and "know" what they're downloading from various websites?

Thanks, @mrmirakhur, @Gjoksi & @Scott.

I'm open to the possibility that not everyone will share my view, although I still find the counterview surprising. So much so that I second-guess whether I made my suggestion clear enough.

First let's talk about the motivation for the feature of scanning USB drives. I might be inserting a USB drive that had previously been plugged in at work, or at the print shop, or at a friend/relative's house. Sure, the on-access scan should be enough to protect me. On the other hand, it'd be nice to get an earlier warning of something suspicious on the USB drive, even before I try to access it. Why? Well, there are several reasons: I might prefer to avoid passing an infected disk to someone; it might be helpful if I could let a friend/relative know that their system is infected; perhaps for some reason there's a future period of time when BIS isn't running on my own computer; .... But I'm not scanning in such a way that I want to make it my number one priority — if so, I would manually open up BIS and explicitly request the most rigorous scan. I just want the scanning to happen in the background while the computer is running and the USB drive is plugged in, without causing undue interference with the tasks I'm doing in the foreground. I'm looking to get a small benefit (mitigating an unlikely risk) at minimal cost (automatic task running 'invisibly' in the background).

The current behaviour of locking the USB drive so that it can't be safely ejected until the scan is finished (or manually aborted) sounds as though it could only be useful for some poor lackey who sits in a windowless room and whose sole job all day long is to plug in and scan USB drives (to completion), in which case automating the initiation of the scan would be a marginal convenience. And in which case preventing this unfortunate soul from ejecting before completion of the scan would avoid incomplete scans as an absolute priority. I still really can't see that this behaviour would realistically be suitable for anybody in practice.

Second, let's talk about usability. Suppose we apply the same logic to other applications. I have some web browsers that I might have configured to download updates in the background. And the operating system is configured to defragment disks while idle, and also to run the search indexer. And so on, and so on. In summary, there are a whole lot of tasks that run in the background. Now suppose that it's the end of the day and I want to log off and shut the computer down. However, the OS tells me "Sorry, the system cannot be shut down right now". But it doesn't tell me why. The culprit is anonymous. Apparently it's all my fault, because among all the many background tasks that could be running, and among all the several background tasks that are actually running, I'm supposed to hunt around manually launching the respective web browsers, Control Panel, etc. trying to find the running background task that has locked up the system, preventing the computer from being shut down. I don't think so!!! Computer users would never put up with this.

So what is different about the current behaviour of the USB drive scanning? To me this should be a background process that is done only when it's convenient. When I request (through the OS) that the media be ejected, then it's because I'm done. I don't want to have to fish around trying to figure out which application has locked up the disk. And once the disk is ejected, the threat it poses to my system disappears.

One final point: I am not proposing to "add" functionality. I am proposing to change the existing "autoscan" functionality, because I consider the current implementation of the "autoscan" functionality to be flawed.

Scott has advised that his solution is to disable "autoscan" currently. I wait to hear from any users who love the current "autoscan" behaviour, and who believe that the modified behaviour that I proposed above would somehow be worse for them.

—DIVERSE

P.S. The GUI refers exclusively to "flash drives", rather than "USB drives". In principle when I say "USB" I'm open to the connector being Firewire or something else. It's worth noting that the descriptor "flash drives" does not include external USB hard-disk drives — although I wouldn't take it for granted that Bitdefender actually checks the nature of the media before deciding whether to scan or not.