Avast is selling your browsing data
17Hi, if anyone’s using Avast’s anti-virus product, they’ve been selling data collected from their product for a while: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qjdkq7/avast-antivirus-sells-user-browsing-data-investigation
Up to you, but I’d recommend getting rid of them since there’s so many other players in the market- both free & paid.
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And Avast owns AVG, so…
“Nothing on the interwebs is ever really free.”
Avast and shiver me timbers, lad, that’s forlorn news.
/giphy shiver me timbers
At least on my Mac, the data sharing was opt-out not opt-in as the Vice article states many times.
I installed it a few months ago and it never asked for my permission to share data.
After learning about this yesterday, I went into the app and found the check-box giving permission to share my data checked. I never checked it, I had to seek it out and uncheck it. That’s opt-out.
Anyway, today I went ahead and uninstalled it.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Any “safe surfing” extension or email scanning software necessarily has to send your info out to some crowd-sourced service to determine if the website you’re visiting (or the stuff the web page loads behind the scenes) or the email you’re reading contains Bad Things
.
And everything is crowd-sourced “as a service” these days.
Not any different than Google for in-page ads or AT&T selling your DNS lookup info for the websites you visit and how long you’re connected to pornhub (even with some of the cheesier VPNs). That is what the fight over DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS is about.
@mike808 actually you can design it to not hit the cloud. for example check out emsisofts browser extension:
https://blog.emsisoft.com/en/32517/new-in-2018-12-safe-web-browsing-with-emsisoft-browser-security/
@mike808 The safe-surfing stuff, some of the less infernal variants, do some hashing scheme to grab groups of related sites in a way that preserves degrees of privacy. I forget the details. I remember considering whether or not to turn it on.
@mike808 There’s no third party involved in the Google ads delivery.
@craigthom Other than every company Google places an ad for, or sells site analytics to. That’s like saying Facebook is golden because they don’t sell your data to a third party either. Well, except for this one time at band camp (Cambridge Analytica).
@mike808 I didn’t day it was good, just that Google wasn’t giving your individual data to third parties the way Avast apparently is. Google does all that in house.
I’m pretty sure the whole thing is a scam.
IIRC, I installed it after reading a warning about Mac malware somewhere on the net - not like a random pop-up, probably an ‘article’ on Lifehacker - that suggested Avast as one possible (edit:) trustworthy free solution.
I installed Avast and it found exactly the file that the article warned about.
Since then, all it’s done is pop up and warn me of potential dangers which I could avoid if I just paid for the premium service.
I just hope it didn’t leave anything behind when I uninstalled it.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@DennisG2014 I had just uninstalled Avast today for a different reason, then noticed that the Chrome extension was still installed and active. So uninstall does not necessarily mean uninstall… Now I feel like I need to root around a bit for more.
@DennisG2014 That sounds “trustworthy free” alright.
Huh, well, I use avast, and used AVG before that, so what’s a girl to do? Just checked and indeed there was a check mark to share my info w/third parties, to which I would not have agreed.
What’s a good antivirus service?
@mossygreen The one built into Windows.
And for browsers, something like Ghostery is really good about knowing about different kinds of trackers, beacons, analytics, ads, and social tracking (FB, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc).
It gives you control over what sites to trust or even which parts of sites to trust. The side effect of privacy is that you don’t get rewards and discounts that are part of those ads and trackers that you’re blocking. Ghostery lets you pause blocking, then resume after, and other fine-grained control over who you share what with. You’d be surprised how infested some major sites are.
Ghostery. Recommended for browsers.
And something like Malwarebytes to manually scan after you’ve been in the seedier parts of the internet.
@mike808 @mossygreen that’s been my strategy since win10, though I had never heard of Ghostery. Seems useful, though I had to laugh when I went to their website and got a pop-up that the site uses cookies…
@mossygreen For your browser, Privacy Badger has worked well for me- if you want to go all the way, uBlock Origin (not uBlock- different and not worse).
For the anti-virus, just uninstall Avast, and use Windows Defender (I mean you could pay for an anti-virus if you want to, but Windows Defender should be).
@mike808 @mossygreen @ybmuG
California has a new law started January 1 about privacy notifications and protections
so you’ll see a lot of those cookie notice pop-ups from fairly honorable websites now, because they’re trying to comply with the California law
And European law before it. I’ve had to add the cookies notification to my sites since GDPR started being enforced in 2018.
Is there anyone who is not selling my data?
@Pamela I am not selling your data.
I even have a website with thousands of daily users and I don’t sell their data either. I both don’t know how to sell user data, and wouldn’t if I did.
@ravenblack Now I’m curious. What site is it?
@TPS ravenblack.net, with most of the users concentrated at http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl (a thing that’s being going for about 20 years now, and it shows because I haven’t restyled it!)
@ravenblack I’m glad to hear that and I appreciate your policy against selling user data. Thanks.
@ravenblack yknow, i’ve been looking for something fun to do instead of work. this is exactly the type of thing i was looking for!
I heard that Meh is sharing data with morningsave,mediocretiee…
Well that was fast…
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/01/avast-kills-off-jumpshot-the-subsidiary-that-sold-all-your-web-data/
Why is it every last feces-gobbler in the world who puts on a suit suddenly thinks they’re entitled to creepily, invasively, collect and then sell information about me? And why don’t they receive the physical beatings they’re actually entitled to? None of this adds up.
@InnocuousFarmer
Has to do with these hideous persons being:
totally amoral or immoral;
entitled to all the riches they can game into flowing in their general direction, legal or il-;
being surrounded by and protected by: venture capitalists, lobbyists, lawyers, and marketing people etc;
being v v rich;
lying about and concealing what they do;
being protected by Congresscritters whose pockets are stuffed with their campaign contributions;
and being physically elsewhere, so that it’s hard to get one’s hands on them.
Welcome to post-post-post-modern economics and politics.
@f00l I blame the voters. This is why I am in favor of doubling down on the electoral college. The people are too willfully stupid to ever wise up. More elitism!