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With viruses, malware and increasingly frequent attacks on the network, Avast's offer seems difficult to refuse. This Czech company has been offering a completely free antivirus for Windows, Mac and Android for years, a permanently updated security suite that has already been downloaded to more than 435 million devices worldwide. It doesn't have as many functions as a paid antivirus, but it promises basic protection when browsing and downloading files from the network.

Too good to be true? It has turned out to be yes. An investigation of Motherboard and PC Mag has revealed the formula of the profitability of Avast. You do not charge for this basic antivirus but it sells very detailed information of its users to third parties from a subsidiary company, Jumpshot.

The granularity of the data is impressive. Avast extensions for the browser or applications installed in the system record each mouse movement and each link clicked by each user. These data are aggregated and 'anonymized', in theory, eliminating the user's personal information, but maintaining a unique identifier for each account.

Jumpshot sells this data package to large companies interested in investigating how users interact with their websites (how much time they spend looking at the web before buying a product, for example, or which button they prefer to complete a purchase). Among the clients that Jumpshot presumes are giants such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Home Depot, Pepsi, McKinsey or IBM, although Microsoft and IBM have said they have no business relationship.

The problem with these data, the researchers explain, is that the level of detail is so high that it is not difficult to know who is behind each identification number . For a company like Amazon it is trivial to link the behavior of a user on their website with a real name and address. Simply compare this supposedly anonymous data with your internal database that specifies who purchased a particular product on a specific date and time.

With the identity of the person cleared, you can investigate their habits online. Discover the type of search you perform, the terms used or the behavior on the website of your competitors. Something similar happens on other websites. It is enough that the user is registered in some way in some of them to assign a real name to that supposedly anonymous number of each account. The database to which Jumpshot sells access claims to have more than 100 million unique users.

Jumpshot has commercialized this data in different packages and with different degrees of access. One of its products, for example, allows you to focus on the search terms that users use on the web. Since it is an extension installed in the system, it is no use for a user to navigate in incognito mode . The terms you are looking for are also associated with identity.

The company has also offered at least one company (marketing giant Omnicom), access to all information for an annual contract of 6.5 million dollars. Omnicom has a platform, Annalect, that aggregates information and data from various sources so that companies can identify and track their customers' behavior more effectively.

Avast ensures that it has stopped collecting user data through browser extensions except for security purposes . A few months ago, in fact, their extensions temporarily disappeared from the Google and Mozilla directories. Yes, it continues to collect this data, however, from the antivirus application on both mobile and conventional computers.

Users, explain from Avast, can choose not to share browsing data with Jumpshot from the app's configuration panel. For new installations, data collection is disabled by default unless the client chooses to participate and in the coming weeks they will ask for consent from users who already have Avast installed.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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