Avast antivirus harvested user data, then sold to Google, Microsoft

Everywhere I looked this morning I found foreboding news and now this

 

Exactly, they are only sorry that they got caught. They clearly didn't care about their users. You can't trust such a company anymore in my view. An AV or any other security tool shouldn't do any tracking period.

 

From that URL:

I can't imagine how anyone would want that.

I disable everything that involves some remote machine seeing what I do. Whether it's checking URLs, or whatever.

That's like 100% anti-privacy.

 

Avast to 'Archive' Users' Collected Browser Histories, Not Immediately Delete Them
February 6, 2020
https://www.pcmag.com/news/avast-to-archive-not-delete-users-collected-browser-histories

 

Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice...
Sorry, they don’t get that chance with me. Too egregious.

 

And think about it. This is only a one that we know of because it surfaced as it has and made wide ranging PR.

 

Or https://www.wilderssecurity.com/posts/2893408/

Edit: Make that https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/w10-local-file-searches-go-to-microsoft-servers.425888/

 

I just posted again in that thread to make it clear that you can use DocFetcher locally, on your own computer, without any internet connection at all. Is that why you referenced my post?

Hope all’s well your way!

 

Install Java Runtime

 

Concerning Mirimir and EASTER posts —
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/thr...-go-to-microsoft-servers.425888/#post-2893423

 

Yeah, sorry about the confusion. I meant to point to the thread, not to your post

 

Yes, the W10 search issue is a perfect example of “what we don’t know we don’t know” with this thread in context.

 

Right, and the story blew up only because something broke at Microsoft that made search stop working.

 

Avast under investigation for the sale of personal data to third-parties
February 12, 2020
https://betanews.com/2020/02/12/avast-under-investigation/

 

I used to love Avast back when the interface was like a media player. I defended it even though it had some flaws. Like not providing a "cleaning" option and just delete the file could make user lose programs and potentially make the system unbootable unless you told the user to keep making vrdb or whatever it was called. I still would install on my clients and friends computers at least for the preventive measure. Then came cloud scanning. One company did it and then everyone has to do it. I never trusted cloud. The program uploads the file in the background. To be scanned by some behavior scanner on another system. That could be done locally. Some companies do it by reputation although it is not clear how the reputation is build up. In old Comodo versions the rep was built by user votes. The main purpose of Cloud is to collect Data. Everyone wants your Data. But anyways Cloud scanning usefulness can be best defined by Eset 5's own help file:
You can decide to not enable the ESET Live Grid. You will not lose any functionality in the software, and you will still receive the best protection that we offer.

Another thing Avast did was marrying Chrome. They insisted with each update that they recommend it for security. And sometimes it will install by itself. It's incredible that a security company does this.

After that it got worse. When you uninstall Avast then Microsoft Office and other software wouldn't work and you have to reinstall Windows. Even AVG got the bug when they fused with Avast.

 

Good point, is this news from last year or what? From what I understood, last year Avast agreed to stop with this practice of data harvesting, but I may be wrong.

 

It looked like January 29, 2021 to me at first sight. My fault.

 

there's too many ppl using Internet to bother, and some have more than 1 host, population is growing rapidly which adds to the noise. Secondly, we can't be fully in control using the Internet, which is by design not private, either avast or something else already has all the data it wants (data breaches, trackers)
I am more interested in the AV being effective, being it privacy oriented would be a nice addon . Avast is one of the best AV there is
EDIT: damn its old post sry