Avast sells scraped user data, profits

Am I surprised? No.

Definitely doesn’t look good for them.

My decision to just use Defender and rely on basic sense seems better now.

I’m still shocked that anyone does anything else where a corporate IT agent isn’t forcing whatever AV onto their machine.

They’re scared, and they don’t trust themselves.

These days my biggest issue with malware and virus, etc. comes from freaking pop-ups. And these are embedded in ads that even major websites just let flow onto their site relying heavily on some advertising scheme to actually review what they release. And I know Chrome especially is full of extension pretending to be the real thing for that.

Oh, I feel no remorse whatsoever about running Brave with the adblocker up. If none of you fuckers can be trusted to curate your ad streams to a basic level of user safety, sucks to be you.

I’ve always thought AVAST was the worst, too - one of the bad ones. My mother in law had it at some point and it was causing her no end of grief so I removed it and just left Defender in place to do its thing.

Once again, if you’re not paying for the product, then YOU are the product.

Sure but recording clicks seems… excessive.

It seems lucrative too.

I’d defender something that you have with Windows 10? I used to use Avast a long time ago. I’m using AVG now. Not sure if that is much better. I suspect that I probably am the product as I’m not paying anything. I’ve never actually had it detect anything before so I don’t know if it’s useful or not.

It’s not hugely common to actually pick up a virus using just typical caution. It shouldn’t pick up much very often. Now malware though… like the ad type crap is different.

Avast is AVG:

Doh! I think I’m going to uninstall it. I just did a virus scan and it only took 15 seconds and then tried to convince me to pay money to resolve all these “problems” with my computer.

To be 100% fair, just about every free AV program I’ve used pitches these offers to me periodically. I figure that’s the price, as opposed to spending money on the thing.

I don’t think I’ve used a third party AV in over fifteen years. From what I’ve seen on other peoples’ Windows PCs, not only do they not work; they actually cause problems. When you look back on the history of Windows security since 95, the AV software industry seems like a bad joke. Invasive, bloated, expensive, and almost entirely ineffectual software suites.

Smart browsing and e-mail habits, along with security patching and staying away from as many virus vectors (Java, Flash, Acrobat, et cetera) as possible is vastly more effective than anti-virus programs.

The last good AV product was Malwarebytes but that’s no longer the case (which is a shame since I snagged a few lifetime keys before they went sub-based!). I’ve only been using what’s built into Windows 10 these past few years, with no issues. 3rd party AV products really do create more problems than they fix, in my experience.