Why We Stopped Recommending Avast & AVG
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https://www.safetydetectives.com/blog/avast-scandal-why-we-stopped-recommending-avast-avg/
Our readers have been messaging us and asking why we’re still ranking Avast and AVG on our website, despite them being caught up in a serious scandal. Well, after a lot of consideration and back and forth between departments, we’ve decided to finally remove them from all of our lists.
Why? Because Avast — which also owns AVG — has been caught in a firestorm of controversy over the last several months regarding serious allegations of unethical business practices.
The Avast Online Security browser extension was deleted from Mozilla, Chrome, and Opera marketplaces in December 2019 after claims that it was gathering a suspicious amount of user data — not only every website visited, but also user location, search history, age, gender, social media identities, and even personal shipping information. Three months later, Avast shut down a subsidiary company, Jumpshot, in the wake of investigative reports documenting the sale of personal data from around 100 million users, all gained through improper user surveillance.
Essentially, Avast and AVG’s Online Security extensions were recording their users’ every click — documenting which websites were visited, when, and from where. While Avast claimed that data collection was a necessary part of the Online Security plugin, browser extensions from competing brands seemed to work fine without collecting and retaining such a large amount of personal information.
