Hot Take Avast Hit with Multimillion-Euro Fine for GDPR failure

[Spartan]

Avast hit with multimillion-euro fine for GDPR failure

Punishment relates to Avast data processing before 2020

www.techradar.com

Cybersecurity and antivirus company Avast has been hit with a €13.7 million ($14.9 million) fine for processing customers’ data illegally as per GDPR requirements.

Spanish not-for-profit NGO Facua, which focuses on consumer rights matters, made Spain’s Agency for Data Protection aware that Avast had collected and sold private browsing data, including identifying data, without knowledge or authorization.

Facua credits PCMag and Motherboard for first bringing the matter to public attention, which saw Avast wrongly handling personal data under its subsidiary, Jumpshot.

 

[HarborFront]

Old news before 2020

 

[Trident]

The fine shows that dirty practices don’t go unpunished in Europe. Although on Gen’s 2.7 bn revenue, this is a very small amount.

 

[upnorth]

From one pure protection point of view, just check out the longtime testing in the malware HUB that member @Andrew3000 been kind enough to share, as that show their free AV product it's strength and very few weaknesses. Along with some silly good analysts and re-searchers that I know work for the company, this news on the GDPR fine still ain't the best in town and obvious will sting. What will hurt the most and cost the company big time, is the brand getting stained, again. In the world of investors that matters. If I was a user/customer ( I'm not ) I would obvious blame those in charge that thought it was a brilliant idea and decided to use Jumpshot ( click for a small history on what occurred ).

Personal I think the report from last year 2022, on undiscovered vulnerabilities ( sandbox escapes etc ) for 10 years was way more serious. Now patched just to be clear. Also reported by Trendmicro actively used in Ransomware attacks.

 

[artek]

From one pure protection point of view, just check out the longtime testing in the malware HUB that member @Andrew3000 been kind enough to share, as that show their free AV product it's strength and very few weaknesses. Along with some silly good analysts and re-searchers that I know work for the company, this news on the GDPR fine still ain't the best in town and obvious will sting. What will hurt the most and cost the company big time, is the brand getting stained, again. In the world of investors that matters. If I was a user/customer ( I'm not ) I would obvious blame those in charge that thought it was a brilliant idea and decided to use Jumpshot ( click for a small history on what occurred ).

Personal I think the report from last year 2022, on undiscovered vulnerabilities ( sandbox escapes etc ) for 10 years was way more serious. Now patched just to be clear. Also reported by Trendmicro actively used in Ransomware attacks.

As much as I agree that Avast is basically spyware, most of the web scanning implemented by AV products tick the same box for me. Especially when they MITM your https connections. Even Trend's product can be configured to analyze every url and even scan (and potentially forward) emails from browser-based webmail (and they're not the only product that does these things). Are we really sure other security companies aren't doing exactly the same thing? We're basically letting them scan every url we ever visit...