But is that the world that you want to strive for? Is it really the ideal scenario for us as consumers? Wouldn't it rather make more sense to restrict Google & Co. Of course, if there are hundreds of parties stealing and exchanging our data, then Google, Facebook and Amazon will loose an advantage. Only AVG Online Security extensions remains listed. Update (): Google unexpectedly removed three of the extensions from Chrome Web Store. Or does anybody have a contact at Google who would be able to help?
Extensions have only ever been removed from the Chrome Web Store after considerable news coverage. I used that one of course, but previous experience shows that it never has any effect. The only official way to report an extension here is the “report abuse” link. We unpublished these extensions from our store.Īnd what about Google? Google Chrome is where the overwhelming majority of these users are. 16 hours later I received a response from Opera: Update (): I also reported these extensions to Opera.
So for existing users these extensions will still be active and continue spying on the users. Mozilla didn’t blacklist the extensions however, stating that they are still talking to Avast. Mozilla immediately disabled the extension listings, so that these extensions can no longer be found on the Mozilla Add-ons site. So yesterday I reported these four extensions to Mozilla and Google. Spying on your users is clearly a violation of the terms that both Google and Mozilla make extension developers sign. Yes, you are the product – even if you paid for that antivirus. That sounds exactly like the data that Avast collects from their SafePrice and Online Security users. Look into any category, country, or domain. Analyze it however you want: track what users searched for, how they interacted with a particular brand or product, and what they bought. Incredibly detailed clickstream data from 100 million global online shoppers and 20 million global app users. On their website, Jumpshot praises its “clickstream data” product: And indeed, that suddenly made perfect sense. The amount of data collected here exceeds by far what would be considered necessary or appropriate even for the security extensions, for the shopping helpers this functionality isn’t justifiable at all.Īfter I published my article I got the hint to look at Jumpshot, a company acquired by Avast in 2013. While this article only names Avast Online Security and AVG Online Security extensions, the browser extensions Avast SafePrice and AVG SafePrice show the same behavior: they upload detailed browsing profiles of their users to uib.ff. A month ago I wrote about Avast browser extensions being essentially spyware.
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