Journalists caught the Avast Software company selling personal data of millions of users of Avast antivirus. The buyers were the world's largest companies, including Google, Yelp, Microsoft, McKinsey, Pepsi, Sephora, Home Depot, Condé Nast, according to a joint investigation by Motherboard and PCMag.
The buyers of the database were able to closely monitor the behavior of people on the Internet. The "All clicks" option gave full access to data about all visited pages and movements between sites. It clarifies that Avast also collected data on the GPS coordinates of Google Maps users, the history of visits to pages on LinkedIn and video views on YouTube. In addition, using the information collected by the antivirus, you can find out at what time the user went to porn sites and what kind of videos they watched.
A subsidiary of Jumpshot was used to sell browser history data. According to Avast, up to 435 million people use their software every month. The documents owned by Jumpshot mention the collection of data from 100 million users.
The database does not contain information about the names of users or their other personal data. However, with the help of other data collected by the antivirus, it is quite possible to deanonymize the user, the journalists note, citing experts.
Avast said it collected and sold information only from those who gave their consent. However, a survey conducted by journalists showed that users were not aware of the trade in their data.
The material also clarifies that since last week, Avast antivirus began to request permission to collect personal data in a pop-up window from users.
The fact that Avast antivirus collected personal data of users became known in December 2019. It was then claimed that the company could exploit the data of 400 million customers.