Avast sells your browsing data for advertising without consent
Our data was collected since 2014 and sold to more than 100 companies
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission will ban Avast from selling or licensing your browsing data for advertising purposes. In addition, Avast will need to pay $16.5 million for the damage. After all, they promise that our data is safe, and they did the opposite. On top of that, Avast didn’t even ask for our consent in this matter.
Does Avast still sell data?
According to Avast’s privacy policy, they may provide our data for the purpose of distribution, sale, or management of their products. However, Avast didn’t specify that they would sell our data to other companies. Additionally, Jumpshot, Avast’s subsidiary, got more than eight petabytes of browsing data from the parent company since 2014.
Avast closed Jumpshot in 2020 after past allegations from the FTC. However, Avast didn’t delete the user data. Furthermore, there are various types of data, such as unique identifiers for each browser, timestamps, our city, state, and country, and the type of device and browser. On top of that, Avast also gathered a combination of info from every site.
In addition, in a random sample from the data entries, the FTC discovered searches for Google Maps directions, a unique member ID for a French dating site, and an announcement for a presidential candidacy.
Unfortunately, according to the FTCÂ complaint, more than 100 companies have access to our past data. However, there is some good news. Soon, the company won’t be able to sell our data to others anymore. Furthermore, they have to drop any products or algorithms that use our information. Additionally, they have to delete all of the data they share.
Ultimately, we should be careful without data and extensions, especially if we use antivirus services like Avast. After all, most of us install various extensions, and not all of us check them thoroughly. However, in this case, if Avast used our data, they will have to notify us according to FTC.
After this incident, you might want to learn how to uninstall Avast Secure Browser.
What do you think? When was the last time you used Avast? Let us know in the comments.
