Most of us use AVG, the third most popular antivirus product in the world according to expert market analysis. The antivirus company boasts about 9 percent share of the global market, 6 percent behind Avast and 13 percent behind Microsoft which stakes 23 percent of the market.[Source: OPSWAT]
Recently, the company has announced a change in its privacy policy in which it boldly and openly admits that it will collect user details and sell them to online advertisers for the purpose of continuing to fund its free antivirus products. This new privacy policy is expected to come into effect as from 15th October 2015.
Information expected to be collected includes:
§ ID associated with user device
§ Browsing and search history, including metadata; data that describes other data
§ User internet service provider and/or mobile network
§ Information regarding other user installed applications and how they are used
The antivirus company stated that it would not sell personal data like name, email addresses, addresses, or credit card details, but this sensitive information might sometimes leak inside the browsing history.
AVG’s previous privacy policy had stated that it could only collect data on "the words you search", but did not specify that browser history data could be collected and furthermore sold to third parties.
Security experts argue that this change places AVG antivirus squarely into the category of spyware. Users have been urged to uninstall the software as soon as they can because it is utterly unethical and an absolute abuse of the trust given to the security software.
As much as this is not too different from data mining conducted by Facebook or Google, the only difference is that AVG provides antivirus software with unrestricted access to our computers, with ability to spy into every file.
Whether users uninstall this antivirus or take AVG for their word is up to the end users themselves. It is however, cardinal to note that there are plenty of other alternative anti-virus programs out there to choose from that don’t sell user data to third parties.
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