The Antivirus maker AVG has announced its privacy policy in which the company informs users that it will collect and sell users’ personal data to advertisers.
If you think that there is something really free on the Internet you are probably wrong. Someone ask you to pay for their products and services, others use their customers data for commercial purposes.
The popular Antivirus maker AVG has announced its privacy policy in which the company informs users that it will collect and sell users’ data to online advertisers. This is a mechanism used by the firm to finance its free antivirus product.
The AVG’s policy will become effective from October 15, the company clarified that it will commercialize only “non-personal data” in order to “make money from our free offerings so we can keep them free.”
AVG confirmed that it will not sell personal data which include name, email addresses, residential addresses, neither credit card details.
The term “non-personal data” could deceive you, AVG will collect from its users a lot of data that could help to profile them such as:
- Browsing History,
- Search History,
- Meta-data,
- Advertising ID associated with your device,
- Internet Service Provider (ISP) or Mobile Network you use to connect to AVG products,
- Information regarding other apps you have on your device.
The new policy enlarges the spectrum of data collected by the firm, previous policies allowed it to collect only information related to online researchers and information related the malicious code that infected the machine.
Unfortunately, some personal data are often present in the browsing history, so AVG have to filter it before selling it.
This data could include also personally identifiable data like addresses, IPs and age.
Bad time for the utopian user’s privacy.
Pierluigi Paganini Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.
