FTC bans antivirus giant Avast from selling its users' browsing data to advertisers
Avast closed its Jumpshot subsidiary in 2020 after the antivirus giant was caught selling the browsing activity of millions of its customers.
When you want antivirus but instead get virus. It makes your PC slow and sells your data. What more definition do you need?
If there's anyone out there still using Windows or who otherwise needs an antivirus, just use ClamAV. It's free and open-source, does a pretty good job of finding viruses, can be run as a daemon, and is extensible.
Want a different index? Fangfrisch. Want a GUI? ClamTk. Using Windows? ClamWin.
I honestly find it so strange that it took me around eight years to discover that this was a thing. I was forced to use McAfee, Norton, Kaspersky, BitDefender, and all of the worst AV software on the market before I eventually switched to Linux.
I disagree about ClamAV in-so-far as its vanilla virus signature database. You really should use some third party ones though you have to be careful since some like specifically malware patrol are way too general. For example, malware patrol will identify any document mentioning any drive.google.com URL a virus.
In regards to MP, I actually submitted the offending signature to MP support and the CSR told said and I quote "Unfortunately that is not a false positive, there is confirmed malware hosted at drive.google.com." It caught my attention because a bunch of READMEs from some github projects and some HTML files ended up in the quarantine. I asked if future signatures would include this general URL since I'm going to blacklist this specific signature and was told basically 'yes, probably'.
I do recommend third parties though and most are free for personal use. Some require a key and therefore some sort of sign up but it isn't terrible except perhaps in regards to where I'm posting, some would consider it so.
Bookmarking this to help motivate customers that still install Avast (and AVG for that matter) and just click "yes" to all the extra "features" being installed. Some even pay for the shit and just get a very slow and distracting PC from just so many apps just running and keep popping notifications advertising more "protection" levels to buy. So many people fall victim to scams that abuse the built-in Windows OS and all browsers' notification systems. And the supposed programs that claim to be "speeding up your PC and keeping you protected" are non-stop the same tactics.
Avast, AVG, and Norton (which I think are all owned by the same company if I remember correctly) love installing their bullshit Chromium browsers and default to launching on startup and take over being the OS default. This is peak capitalism for the AV world. No value and charge you more and more even after you pay for it all.
Sounds like a new market opening up. Anybody want to make anti-antivirus software?
Oh boy, I sure do hope this happens to other companies that do it!
What? What does an astrotruf-review detection app have anything to do with avast?
Corporate giant owns a subsidiary that sells browsing data.
