Avast a popular antivirus application and its subsidiary AVG have been accused of selling highly sensitive browsing histories of millions of their user.
An investigation carried out by Motherboard and PCMag discovered that both Avast and AVG which are among the most commonly used antivirus programs have been tracking Google searches, GPS coordinates, including browsing history and watching users’ browsing patterns, watched YouTube videos even porn website visits.
The investigation opened up that Avast used another subsidiary named Jumpshot to repackage the data and sell it to companies like Google, Yelp, Microsoft, McKinsey, Pepsi, Home Depot, Condé Nast, Intuit, and more.
The data were collected using the free antivirus program installed on the computer. The big infringement is that it collected these data without the consent of millions of users who were unaware of what the data harvest as well as its being sold to large companies without their consent.
Even though no particular personality was readily identifiable from the kind of data gathered, investigation found it was fairly easy to unmask an individual due to the amount of data available.
Jumpshot Avast’s off-shoot has reportedly made millions from sales of data to big companies who use this data to target users with specific advertising messages.
Jumpshot sold data to major e-commerce websites like amazon.com, walmart.com, target.com, bestbuy.com, and eBay.
This wasn’t a one-off incident since the company’s browser extension was previously found to be a tracking tool for users’ data collecting data without consent and sending it over to Jumpshot.
Once discovered, the company quickly discontinued data harvesting and adhered to web browser’s policies.