Do you use Avast on your computer? Well, your data has been for sale and their anonymity has been conspicuous by its absence

Privacy and the use made of our data is something that worries us more and more. A topic that comes up when we talk about any system that connects to the network and that requires data collection to offer proper operation. The integrity of the information that concerns us is more questioned than ever

The problem comes when a program or an application that is supposed to protect us, may be playing with two decks and behind our backs, putting the data it collects for sale in the hands of the highest bidder.This is what they say in an investigation carried out by Motherboard and PCMag in which they reveal that Avast has sold data collected from users to third-party companies

Avast in the spotlight

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In case there is someone who does not know it, Avast is one of the most popular antivirus programs and owned by the same group that owns AVG, another alternative to protect ourselves>from external threats and spywarebut… who watches the police?"

According to research carried out by Motherboard and PCMag, both Avast and AVG have been conducting a study of the activity of users who have one of these solutions installed. The software has spied on users' movements on the network to later sell them as anonymous data to third-party companies.

This data is anonymous as it is never linked to a person's name, email address or IP address Each history of user is assigned an identifier called device ID that does not disappear until the user uninstalls Avast antivirus.

According to the investigation, companies such as Google, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Yelp, Home Depot, Expedia, Intuit, Keurig, Condé Nast, Sephora, Loreal or McKinsey have been the recipients of the data collected that includes references to searches, positioning location with GPS, links visited on YouTube, pages searched on LinkedIn or porn pages.

The data is collected and managed by Jumpshot, a company that is responsible for creating data packages and then selling them to third-party companies. And when we consider that Avast claims to have more than 435 million monthly active users and Jumpshot claims to have data from 100 million devices, we can get an idea of the market they could handle.

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When installing Avast or AVG, the user will see a pop-up window that asks: Would you mind sharing some data with us?>Does not warn about the sale of this data to third partiesYou have to go to the fine print to see some curious details related to the way in which the data is connected or how it is stored for 36 months."

The problem, apart from the users' lack of knowledge about the use of the data, is that their supposed anonymity is not such, since they can be associated with users individuals as stated in different studies.

Is it one of the consequences of having free applications? That the product is us? The truth is that worrisome information does not stop appearing. We have seen how both Mozilla and Google study dangerous extensions in their browsers.They have even removed Avast extensions from their app stores.

Via | Motherboard and PCMag Cover image | Madartzgraphics