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Equally we've learned time and time again, "gratis" things on the internet are nigh never truly gratuitous. If you're non paying with coin, you're probably paying with your data. That's the case with the gratis antivirus products from Avast, which harvest browsing history for sale to major corporations. Despite claims that its data is fully anonymized, an investigation past our sis site PCMag and Motherboard shows how easy it is to unmask individual users.

Avast, which offers antivirus products under its own make too as AVG, has traditionally gotten high marks for its malware blocking prowess. When setting upwards the company's free AV suite, users are asked to opt into data drove. Many do then afterwards beingness assured all the data is anonymized and aggregated to protect their identities. Nevertheless, Avast is collecting much more than granular information than anyone expected, and that puts your privacy at run a risk.

Avast markets user data through its Jumpshot subsidiary, which has relationships with firms like Google, Pepsi, Microsoft, and Home Depot. PCMag and Motherboard managed to gain access to internal documents and a sample of data from Jumpshot, and they found Avast is tracking user clicks down to the second. Here's an example of Jumpshot's data format.

Device ID: abc123x Date: 2019/12/01 Hour Minute Second: 12:03:05 Domain: Amazon.com Product: Apple tree iPad Pro 10.5 – 2017 Model – 256GB, Rose Gold Behavior: Add to Cart

That doesn't tell you lot anything virtually the person behind the clicks — unless y'all're Amazon. With access to Amazon information, you could but look for users who executed the aforementioned click or series of clicks, and at present you have a proper name associated with the device ID. Of a sudden, Avast's data contains a full tape of that user'due south cyberspace usage. Other companies tin can do the same by matching anonymized clicks in Avast data with their ain records.

Jumpshot offers diverse products to customers, some of which simply include a fraction of the information it collects. For example, one product focuses on searches and what the user ultimately clicked, but Jumpshot also has an "All clicks feed" that includes all its data. Jumpshot normally sells the total feed without device IDs, but information technology agreed to provide the data with IDs to marketing visitor Omnicom Media Group in late 2018. Regardless of how much data Jumpshot offers in each package, calling information technology anonymized is extremely misleading. Once that data is in the wild, you can't know for certain where it will end up.

Avast recently removed the user tracking features from its Chrome extensions, but the standalone desktop programs continue to collect every click. For this reason, PCMag no longer recommends Avast Antivirus.

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