AVAST (Czech company) was great. Then a US company bought it and turned it into spyware.
Skype (Estonian) was great. Then Microsoft bought it and killed it because it didn't spy.
RAV was great. Bought by Microsoft and killed because it actually cleaned desktop viruses [1/2]
Avast sold your browsing history while telling you it was protecting your privacy.
for six years.
Avast antivirus and browser extensions collected URLs, search queries, timestamps, and cookie data from hundreds of millions of users. the pitch: we protect you from online tracking.
Behind the scenes: Avast ran a subsidiary called Jumpshot. Jumpshot packaged that browsing data and sold it to over 100 third parties, advertising companies, marketing firms, data brokers, investment companies.
The data included every webpage you visited, exact timestamps, device and browser type, city, state, country and a unique persistent device identifier attached to your profile.
Avast said it anonymized the data before selling it.
the FTC said that was false, the identifier allowed buyers to trace specific individuals across every website they visited over time.
8 petabytes of browsing data accumulated by 2020.
before 2018 Avast didn't mention any of this in its privacy policy at all.
The FTC fined them $16.5 million in 2024. Avast called it "resolving its investigation of past provisions." they shut down Jumpshot in 2020 after Motherboard first reported it.
$16.5 million is roughly what Avast made selling your data in a single quarter.
the antivirus watching your traffic to protect you from trackers was the tracker 😂.