Are You One Of Avast's 400 Million Users? This Is Why It Collects And Sells Your Web Habits.

'Avast, the multibillion-dollar Czech security company, doesn't just
make money from protecting its 400 million users' information. It also
profits in part because of sales of users' Web browsing habits and has
been doing so since at least 2013. From a report: That's led to some
labelling its tools "spyware," the very thing Avast is supposed to be
protecting users from. Both Mozilla and Opera were concerned enough to
remove some Avast tools from their add-on stores earlier this month,
though the anti-virus provider says it's working with Mozilla to get
its products back online. But recently appointed chief executive
Ondrej Vlcek tells Forbes there's no privacy scandal here. All that
user information that it sells cannot be traced back to individual
users, he asserts. Here's how it works, according to Vlcek: Avast
users have their Web activity harvested by the company's browser
extensions. But before it lands on Avast servers, the data is stripped
of anything that might expose an individual's identity, such as a name
in the URL, as when a Facebook user is logged in. All that data is
analysed by Jumpshot, a company that's 65%-owned by Avast, before
being sold on as "insights" to customers. Those customers might be
investors or brand managers.

What do those customers get? Vlcek says Jumpshot, which was initially
acquired in 2013, provides "insights on how cohorts of users on the
internet use the web." For instance, it could show a percentage of
visitors who went from one website to another. That could be useful to
anyone monitoring an advertising campaign. "Typical customers would
be, for example, investors, who would be interested in how online
companies are doing in terms of their new campaigns," the new Avast
chief explains. Say Amazon launches a new product -- Jumpshot could
determine how much interest it's getting online.'

-- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/12/10/1922243

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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