Avast profits through sales of users’ web browsing habits | Hacker News Reader

Avast profits through sales of users’ web browsing habits

forbes.com

54 pointslabase1920 comments

> But recently appointed chief executive Ondrej Vlcek tells Forbes there’s no privacy scandal here. All that user information that it sells cannot be traced back to individual users, he asserts.

Not that anyone here needs this pointed out, but there's zero chance of this being accurate.

Yeah mapping the individual user has turned out to be rather trivial. There have been numerous articles documenting this.. But apperantly, we privacy conscious folk are just tinfoil hat folk

Agreed. For every effort to anonymize data (just remove their name!) there's ten companys dedicated to tracking down and characterizing every individual.

The details are almost a fingerprint. Know enough (maybe 2 facts?) and you can start to re-identify that 'anonymized' data.

Just knowing a rural route code, and the factoid that an embedded development board was purchased there, and you have identified Me.

To really anonymize data, you cant publish any correlations between the stats. Which is most of the value of the stats.

No such thing as a free lunch. You are the product with companies like Avast. However, when I was poking around with websockets in my browser a few years back I noticed that Kaspersky was opening websocket connections to their servers and uploading full urls of whatever site I visited. They claim that it was to check for malicious sites, such rubbish. THAT pissed me off because I paid for my Kaspersky license.

I spoke to a colleague about it and he asked my why I didn't just use windows defender. I said that it was not good enough and he asked why. These were the days before most people started using it. His argument was that Windows Defender was not advertised at all, nobody paid an army of bloggers to defend it an big it up but that did not make it an inferior product. Why would Microsoft make an anti-virus any less effective than a paid anti virus? I really had no decent argument against it. I guess we just feel better about something if we pay for it. Been using Defender ever since and never had a problem. At least my antivirus doesn't automatically turn off when my credit card expires and they can't bill me.

Microsoft bought Windows Defender. It used to be a paid antivirus.

> Windows Defender was initially based on GIANT AntiSpyware, formerly developed by GIANT Company Software, Inc. The company's acquisition was announced by Microsoft on December 16, 2004.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Defender#History

I've been using it exclusively for a decade.

Wow, I didn't know that. Thanks!

Yes, people who paid for Avast/AVG should be very pissed now. Because the software doesn't care whether you paid.

> But before it lands on Avast servers, the data is stripped of anything that might expose an individual’s identity, such as a name in the URL, as when a Facebook user is logged in.

How would this technically work? I can see this only if you manually created rules for a website like Facebook. How could it know, besides some crude heuristics, that the url:

    example.com/user-profiles/bick-nowstrom?u_idx=556677

contained my name and user id?

It's complete bullshit, provably so. This is suggesting that the data is being stripped of anything related to your identify locally, before being sent to the server. But that's not the case, nothing is being removed, and anybody can use Developer Tools to see it.

And as to anonymization on the server side, I haven't seen any evidence that it exists and so far statements by insiders seem to confirm that there is none. The privacy policy merely promises pseudonymization meaning that Avast can keep the data as it is. Technically speaking, user's name isn't sent and their user identifier is a pseudonym, so it already satisfies the requirements.

Calling Avast a cyber security company is laughable.

You get what you pay for. Another case of if it’s free, you’re probably the product.

Having this kind of cynicism is probably a good guide to how to regard free products, but I don't think it's a good reaction here: it gives the idea that predictable behaviour (a company selling your browsing history) is acceptable behaviour. We should still be outraged, even if the behaviour is predictable.

Acceptable is relative. If you think it should be illegal, that is a different discussion. I do not see how my prediction of behavior in anyway normalizes the behavior or makes any value judgement of it for that matter.

If you think expressing outrage is the most productive thing to do here, we may disagree.

> I do not see how my prediction of behavior in anyway normalizes the behavior or makes any value judgement of it for that matter.

I think that there's a difference between prediction and reaction. I agree that, before the fact, saying "it's not free; you're the product" may be productive. However, after the fact, saying "what did you expect? It was free and you're the product" only implicitly normalises the behaviour, compared to "that was predictable, but nonetheless is not OK."

(You didn't quite say either of these, but I read your response as being more of the "what did you expect?" form. Of course, I might have been wrong!)

If you pay for it, it does not mean you are not the product.

Agree, this seems compatible with my statement.

Your statement doesn't tell much. If it's free, you are probobaly the product, but you may not.

Couldn't have expected it from a nicer company.

i wonder when they'll be classified as spyware/unwanted by others

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