FTC bans antivirus giant Avast from selling its users' browsing data to advertisers | TechCrunch
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Avast closed its Jumpshot subsidiary in 2020 after the antivirus giant was caught selling the browsing activity of millions of its customers.
  • @Mango
    26•9 months ago

    When you want antivirus but instead get virus. It makes your PC slow and sells your data. What more definition do you need?

  • Hellfire103English
    18•9 months ago

    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.

    • Kid_Thunder
      9•9 months ago

      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.

      • Hellfire103English
        6•9 months ago

        Ah, now Kaspersky itself isn’t a bad AV. However, given how much data AV software has the capacity to collect and where Kaspersky is based, I don’t trust it. In that scenario, I may as well switch to Yandex and start using Mail•ru instead of Proton.

          • Hellfire103English
            2•9 months ago

            German is also good, but I personally feel that Proton provides a better experience than Tutanota or Posteo.

        • swayevenlyEnglish
          2•9 months ago

          I am also weary of the data that they can collect especially after logging in but there are versions of the app and licenses where you can mitigate this by turning off certain data collection and not logging in.

          As far as the Russian thing is concerned, I don’t have much to provide other than what I read. Some of that is they have already moved the processing and storage of foreign data to Switzerland.

  • d-RLY?
    5•9 months ago

    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.