Use These Antivirus and Antivirus Apps Instead of Avast
If something is free – especially if it’s something you’ll have to pay for anything complicated or you may otherwise – often known saying is true – you are the product. This is one of the reasons why you are constantly being advertised on the Internet. Search engines, email services, messaging platforms, or other apps and services that you enjoy cost money , and companies have to recoup that somehow (and make a profit).
This is why I think you should reconsider using Avast’s free antivirus product . As recently discovered in a joint report by Motherboard and PCMag, Avast’s subsidiary Jumpshot collects data from Avast antivirus users and sells it to advertisers who can then combine it with other data about your activities to track you in great detail. According to the Motherboard article :
“Avast collects data from users who have agreed and then provides it to Jumpshot, but several Avast users told Motherboard they were unaware that Avast was selling browsing data, which raised questions about how informed this consent was.
Data collected by Motherboard and PCMag includes Google searches, searches for locations and GPS coordinates on Google Maps, people visiting company pages on LinkedIn, certain YouTube videos, and people visiting porn sites. From the collected data, it is possible to determine on what date and time the anonymous user visited YouPorn and PornHub, and in some cases what search query he entered on the porn site and what particular video he watched.
While the data does not include personally identifiable information such as usernames, it still contains a lot of specific browsing data, and experts say it is possible to de-anonymize certain users. “
Avast gained recognition last year after security researcher Vladimir Palant discovered that the company’s browser extensions were sending your browser’s web search history directly to Avast. As a result, Google, Mozilla and Opera removed a number of Avast extensions from their add-on directories until Avast fixed the offending behavior. As Avast PCMag recently said :
“We have completely discontinued the practice of using any data from browser extensions for any purpose other than basic security subsystem, including sharing with Jumpshot.”
To (a little) credit for Avast, the company does provide users with a pretty obvious splash screen when they ask users to share their data. However, as PCMag correctly notes, this screen does not indicate that companies can combine this data with other information they have about you to create a fairly accurate profile of who you are and what you do. Users are also not given any instructions to delete the data that you have already shared with Avast / Jumpshot (if at all possible).
Likewise, Avast specifies which services collect and send your data in their tiny fontprivacy policy , which most people probably don’t read. This includes:
- Browser Cleanup is a desktop antivirus module (Windows) that checks most browser extensions, tries to identify malicious extensions and suggests removing them. Browser cleaning is enabled by default. You can opt out of the processing of cookie data (internal identifier (GUID), product version, time information, original browser, cookie domain, cookie name, cookie value) for trending purposes, which is why Avast provides this data set from a free version. of this product to enable Jumpshot to create products and services. Please see our Consent Policy for more information. “
- “ Web Shield scans the data that is transmitted when you browse the Internet in real time to prevent malware from downloading and running on your computer. By default, Web Shield is configured for optimal protection when enabled. If Web Shield is active and you consent to data processing (internal identifier (GUID), product version, time information, remote URLs (if not cached), carefully selected aspects of certain pages without IDs, selected queries) for trend analysis Consequently, Avast provides this dataset in a sliced and anonymized form from the free version of this product to enable Jumpshot to create products and services. Please see our Consent Policy for more information. “
I have already installed Avast. Now what?
If you don’t do anything else, I recommend opening your Avast settings (via Menu> Settings) and visiting the Personal Privacy section. In it, uncheck the boxes from all the options that Avast offers:
Honestly, I would go ahead and uninstall Avast completely, because you really don’t need a third-party antivirus scanner on your desktop or laptop – at least not on Windows 10. Free antivirus app is built into your operating system, Windows Defender is very effective. and does not collect data about everything you do and does not sell it to third parties.
If you need a little more firepower, you can also install a separate anti-malware application like Malwarebytes (whose privacy policy you can read here ). However, be aware if any future policy changes will push Malwarebytes towards “tracking and selling” rather than being a “useful anti-malware application.” It never hurts to be a skeptic. (I’m also a fan of Malwarebytes’ Adwcleaner if you need a little extra help cleaning up a junk-clogged system.)
Otherwise, you can also check an open source virus and malware scanner like ClamAV . I can’t promise anything about its privacy, but asan open source project , it is at least more transparent about what it does than other third party apps.
For Mac users, it’s common practice to shrug and smile at their fellow Windows – Macs, after all, don’t get viruses. Right? Not really. Macs can be infected with viruses and malware; it’s just less common. Less rarely, perhaps if you have no common sense at all and click or download whatever you see on the web.
If you are sane and don’t try to install things that seem strange, or grant system permissions to anything that asks for it out of the blue, you should be fine. Update your system with the latest security fixes, download Malwarebytes and run a reliable ad blocker in your browser. Run Malwarebytes from time to time to quickly check yourself for malware and other crap, but you probably don’t need a more complete virus scan setup than this.