The updates have been accepted by all browser vendors and, at the time of writing, all four extensions are available for Firefox and Chrome. So when on December 22nd they finally brought out updated versions of their extensions, I was very curious to see what they changed other than writing a usable privacy policy. But the company’s stance didn’t change: all the data collected is necessary to protect users, and selling it later without user’s agreement is completely unproblematic due to the data being “anonymized.” Users clearly disagreed, and so did most journalists. Avast’s CEO Ondrej Vlcek even gave an interview to the Forbes magazine where he claimed that there was no privacy scandal here. I found it hard to believe that a company could keep denying any wrongdoing despite all the evidence to the contrary. The matter of Avast selling users’ data even attracted attention of high-level politicians.Īvast’s official communication throughout that month was nothing short of amazing. Google spent two weeks evaluating the issue but eventually did the same. After my investigation into Avast’s data collection practices didn’t attract any attention initially, Mozilla and Opera removed Avast’s browser extensions from their respective add-on stores immediately after I reported them. December last year has been an interesting month in Avast-land.
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