A $16.5 million fine for selling customer data “for years” when it had promised the opposite, to protect against tracking. Uncovered in January 2020 by Vice News and PCMag.
THE NEXT YEAR … “Avast merged with Norton LifeLock in an $8.1 billion deal.”
Makes that $16.5 million FTC penalty look piddly (0.2% company value), doesn’t it?
The FTC said Avast collected customers’ online browsing habits for years, including their web searches and which websites they visited, using Avast’s own browser extensions, which the antivirus giant claimed would “shield your privacy” by blocking online tracking cookies.
But the FTC alleged that Avast sold consumers’ browsing data through its now-shuttered subsidiary, Jumpshot, to more than a hundred other companies, making Avast tens of millions of dollars in revenue.
CNN notes that Avast “founders lived and worked in Czechoslovakia when it was part of the Soviet Bloc.” Avast is now a UK company, according to cheekily written FTC blog post about the fine.
Although news stories reported that “Avast” was fined, that company no longer exists. It is a brand name. The post-merger company is Gen Digital, which also owns CCleaner.
The merger had been referred to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on the basis that it could potentially result in a substantial lessening of competition within the UK market for consumer security products and services.
In its final report on the matter, which approved the deal, the CMA acknowledged that while both NortonLifeLock and Avast had a strong position in this market and were close competitors with one another, they also faced competitive constraints on both their free and paid-for offerings from a range of suppliers, including the likes of Bitdefender, Eset, F-Secure, Kaspersky, Malwarebytes, Nord and Trend Micro.
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Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com