In a shocking revelation by a report from Motherboard in collaboration with PCMag, it is known that Avast is collecting users’ browsing history and selling it to third-party companies for millions of dollars.
Avast claims that the data has been ‘de-identified,’ meaning that the personal information of users has been obliterated before handing over the data to advertisers and other companies. However, the research says that this ‘de-identified’ data can be linked to individual users with the tools available with the companies to whom the data is being sold.
Jumpshot, an Avast division responsible for selling data, accesses user data from Avast Antivirus’ free browser extension. According to the report, Jumpshot has access to data from over 100 million devices, including PCs and mobile devices.
Avast Knows What You Click Upon At What Time
The severity of data collection from Avast is problematic as the trove of information provided to advertisers contains individual clicks of users and browsing session timestamps down to milliseconds. Additionally, the data also has a unique identifier called device ID.
The data of a single click by a user looks something like this:
For a normal user, it is almost impossible to pin this data to an individual, but if this data is sold to Amazon, you can guess that they can easily figure that a user purchased an Apple iPad Pro 10.5 2017 model on 2019/12/01 at 12:03:05 and find out the exact user who bought it by combining it with their database.
Once Amazon identifies the Device ID, they can use it to find out the shopping history of the user from other e-platforms.
