Antivirus Company Shuts Down Subsidiary After Being Caught Harvesting Users Data

People download antivirus software mostly for one thing: To protect their precious computers from malware. Some of these antivirus softwares are free and others require a subscription to use the software.

PCMag and Motherboard did a joint investigation where they found out that Avast’s division collected user data from its antivirus software. The division, Jumpshot, had data from 100 million devices. They found out that although the collected data is never linked to a person’s name, email or IP adress, you could still figure out who it was. the data they collected included Google searches, location lookups, websites you visited which included precise time stamps and in some cases porn searches.

Well now, Avast’s CEO, Ondrej Vleck decided to clear the air around the data harvesting issue of Jumpshot. “For these reasons, I, together with our board of directors have decided to terminate the Jumpshot data collection and wind down Jumpshot’s operations, with immediate effect,” Vleck said in the post.

Interesting enough, he revealed that Jumpshot acted as an “independent company” and build their products from data coming form Avast. Apparently both Avast and Jumpshot had “committed themselves to 100% GDPR compliance” too.

Vleck also clarified that when he took the role as CEO 7 months ago, he re-evaluated every portion of the business. “I came to a conclusion that the data collection business is not in line with our privacy priorities as a company in 2020 and beyond,” he said.

This scandal made PCMag to no longer recommend Avast Free Antivirus as an “Editor’s Choice” in the category of free antivrus protection.

Well, you may need to uninstall that free Avast Antivirus running in your computer now