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AVG Antivirus Plans to Collect & Sell Your Personal Data to Advertisers?

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ewemoa:
Didn't check in detail myself, but came across the following:

This new policy, which will come into effect on October 15, clearly explains that AVG will be allowed to collect and sell users' "non-personal data" in order to "make money from our free offerings so we can keep them free."

--- End quote ---

Here's the list of, what AVG calls, "non-personal data" the company claims to collect from its customers and sell to interested third-parties, specifically online advertisers:

 * Browsing History,
 * Search History,
 * Meta-data,
 * Advertising ID associated with your device,
 * Internet Service Provider (ISP) or Mobile Network you use to connect to AVG products,
 * Information regarding other apps you have on your device.

Previous policies allowed the firm to only collect:

 * Data on "the words you search",
 * Information about any malware on the users' machine.

--- End quote ---

via https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/avg-antivirus.html

May be someone else can confirm?

mouser:
I am a user of AVG and if this turns out to be true I will drop it like a hot potato.

As a rule I am much less concerned about privacy and data collection than most people, and generally don't worry about anonymous statistic gathering, but what's described here is absolutely outrageous -- so far beyond the pail that it is hardly conceivable.

Can this possibly be true, that AVG is about to flush its reputation down the toilet and start a mass exodus and loss of trust that they will never be able to regain?

For a security tool to do this.. I'm just speechless..

Surely this can't be right?

Innuendo:
Oh, not only can it be right....it gets worse! According to this article:

http://www.techspot.com/news/62159-avg-updated-policy-explains-how-can-sell-users.html

An AVG spokesman explained that AVG has always sold users' data and it has always been disclosed in previous versions of their privacy policy, but it was not laid out in a plainspoken way.

And evidently this new transparent privacy policy is already up on AVG's site for anyone to peruse themselves.

mouser:
Ridiculous.

That page does say this:
For its part, AVG has stated there will be a way for users to opt out once the privacy policy is active. "Those users who do not want us to use non-personal data in this way will be able to turn it off, without any decrease in the functionality our apps will provide," a company spokesperson said.
--- End quote ---

Although the page mentions a clearer privacy policy coming out in October, it's not clear at all whether this collection of data is already happening.

Looking at the options in the *current* version of the program, it's very unclear whether one can turn off these things or just tweak some subset of the nasty information collection:
AVG Antivirus Plans to Collect & Sell Your Personal Data to Advertisers?

dr_andus:
An AVG spokesman explained that AVG has always sold users' data and it has always been disclosed in previous versions of their privacy policy, but it was not laid out in a plainspoken way.
-Innuendo (September 20, 2015, 12:37 PM)
--- End quote ---

I haven't followed the story closely but from the headlines I gathered that AVG are touted as the honest guys telling us as it is, while everyone else does it but hides in legal gobbledygook. So dumping AVG and switching to a competitor might not solve the underlying problem.

But it does sound like AVG have shot themselves in the foot, as naturally a lot of people are going to drop them now. Then everyone else will learn that honesty doesn't pay in this business, and things settle back as they were...

As I had to do a clean Windows install recently, I lost AVG in the process and have just gone with MS Security Essentials instead, as it got installed by the Windows updates more or less automatically. Well, we know that MS is also entering into the private data collection game, so I don't know if MSE is any better in that regard.

What I can say though that scanning files with MSE is way faster than it was with AVG. Generally my 5-yr system is pretty snappy, I don't know how much of that can be put down to not having reinstalled AVG (or maybe it's just the effect of the clean install).

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