#avast

Pew pew, here we go!

Naur is the time to shaur

We ask i’ fearlessly:

Who’s on the Lard’s side who?

We wage na common war

Cope wi’ na common foe

Th’Enemy’s awake

Who’s on the Lard’s side-

*INHALE* WHOOOOOOoooooooo

Avast was collecting users' browser information from 2014 to 2020, then selling it to more than 100 other companies through a since-shuttered entity known as Jumpshot, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Under a proposed recent FTC order (PDF), Avast must pay $16.5 million, which is "expected to be used to provide redress to consumers," according to the FTC.

If you were an Avast user between 2014 and 2020, you might get some cash. Also worth noting: Jumpshot was owned by Avast.

There's two ways to look at this:

Now that Avast is on the FTC's radar, they're gonna be on their best behavior (i.e. safe), or

Now that Avast has been revealed to be unscrupulous, why trust them ever again?

I personally stopped using Avast because their stuff is so freekin invasive and loud. Always popping up with false positives and/or needless "your system is clean!" messages in between ads to buy more Avast products & services. The final nail was when it tried to quarantine my software development tools.

“For years, the antivirus software company harvested information from users’ web browsers without their consent.

“Avast, the cybersecurity software company, is facing a $16.5 million fine after it was caught storing and selling customer information without their consent. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the fine on Thursday and said that it’s banning Avast from selling user data for advertising purposes.

If you use the extension “I Don’t Care About Cookies,” you may have gotten a pop-up tab informing you that the plugin was recently acquired by a company called Avast. The window actually said that Avast was a “famous and trustworthy IT company.”

Avast is not a trustworthy IT company. In 2019 Avast was caught using its browser extensions to harvest data from its users and sell it. Their browser extensions were removed, but later reinstated after an investigation found no concrete evidence, although at minimum their extensions were collecting more data than they needed to do the job. And then Avast got caught doing the same thing with their antivirus program a year later. Avast is widely mistrusted by IT/privacy communities, and it seems like the only reason they would ever have interest in the plugin is to pull this crap again.

Also, from personal experience? I actually did use the Avast antivirus program on my computer for less than a year in 2020, because my work already had it for whatever reason and wanted me to install it when I did remote work. (The company folded a month later because it was 2020, but I got to keep my Avast subscription for the rest of the year. Lucky me.) It slowed down my computer and gave me constant, unending pop-ups several times a day reminding me to renew my subscription, even though the date of my subscription’s end was still several months away. I ended up contacting Avast’s tech support to resolve that issue. They actually ended up renewing my subscription for free just to get the pop-up to go away, and it still didn’t even work. I still got multiple pop-ups every day. After two months of that I finally was like, screw it, and uninstalled...and I still was getting pop-ups. That was the point where I started googling, figured out how terrible the company was, and managed to find a way to completely delete it off of my computer. A lot of forums will refer to the Avast antivirus program as outright malware, and I couldn’t agree more.