Security → AVG changes privacy policy to harvest users' personal data and sell it to ad

Czech Republic-based security software vendor AVG, producer of one of the world's most popular anti-virus software suites, has come under fire over it's privacy policy, which appears to allow it to sell users' data to advertisers.
The policy, which AVG's website says will come into effect in October 2015, has apparently been changed to explicitly allow the collection and sale of personal information relating to browsing history, searches, location and meta-data. Previous policies indicated that the firm only collected browsing data when a person used their their web site as well as information about any malware on the user's machine.

Full Read: »www.computing.co.uk/ctg/ ··· y-policy

TH

Who in their right mind would have been using this crappy AVP in the 1st place..........one of the worst POS out there.

The very 1st thing I do on my customer's machines ,when servicing them is uninstall this garbage and McAfee as well.99% of the problem solved already

Is it AVG, or the EU policy?

»ec.europa.eu/justice/dat ··· x_en.htm

If it's the EU policy, then any other EU country might do same. I use ESET.

Thanks for the heads up, ditched that and now running Avast.

Note that many of the utilities used in cleaning malware either remove the largely Ask based items (MBAM, AdwCleaner) or detect them so they can be manually removed (Farbar Recovery Scan Tool).

Avast is doing the same with your data open avast and go down to settings panel then click privacy you will notice by default it will say participate in data sharing. What they say is your data will be anonymous but they may share your anonymized data with 3rd parties.

Avg is saying the same thing that if your browsing history would identify you they will anonymize it.

Doesn't that misunderstand the point of the EU policy? It doesn't say that a vendor must hawk your personal data around town; it simply puts some constraints on them if they do. In particular the user needs to consent.

If a country doesn't have a data protection policy then there are no constraints, nor requirements for the user to consent.

Maybe you meant that AVG has changed its statement of policy to comply with EU requirements, not that it's changed what it actually does with the data. But it wasn't clear from your wording.

ThThat is what I meant.