Popular antivirus caught selling data on visits of porn sites by users to third parties

Avast, the company that develops the antivirus software of the same name, has repeatedly come under a barrage

Critics in connection with certain manipulations of user data.This time, she was accused of selling this same user data to various companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Pepsi.

About this, as part of a joint investigation,told two reputable publications Motherboard and PCMag. According to them, Avast collected a lot of user data using its own antivirus, and then sold it through a subsidiary called Jumpshot. Among the things that the developer sold to other giant companies were information on the results of user searches on Google, search for various places on Google Maps, the activity of the professional social network LinkedIn, as well as data on visits to the YouTube video service and various porn sites.

So, according to the investigation, the companyOmnicom paid Jumpshot $ 2.07 million for data access in 2019. The only thing that mitigates the situation a bit is that Avast most likely transmitted the data of its users in anonymous form.