McAfee, Webroot and Norton, for example, share more information with their companies than Kaspersky. Windows Defender, by the way, also sends a lot of information. I think that all the arguments about whether it is dangerous or not dangerous to use one or another antivirus is a purely political aspect.
Yep I mentioned in my thread originally, most AV software has similar wording for cloud submission / telemetry. But of the ones I reviewed, Kaspersky has the strongest wording. Nobody else collects exact URLs of your browsing history to improve Web Protection and few collect memory contents...
But again all could be ordered to collect information about you and most have the means to be specifically targeted too.
Another thing that should be noted is that in the end its all about where the data is sent, for example, I live in Sweden and the servers that McAfee connects to almost exclusively servers located in Germany, while Bitdefender, despite being in the EU, connects to almost exclusively US servers with only one connection being to Romania, while Kaspersky was connecting mostly to servers in Switzerland, with some in the UK and a few in Russia, latter of which was servers that didnt process user data
I have some experience here, and it's
both about where the data is sent and who has the keys to the house.
For example, at my company based in the USA, we have complied with legal warrants that target out-of-country non-US-citizens which home to a CDN in the EU. But engineers in the USA have access to said EU servers to comply with the warrant, and therefore it's compelled. OTOH, the way we set up our China operations, we set up a completely independent subsidiary, a different PKI chain for secure boot keys burned into the hardware, and our US employees have zero network or building access to the Chinese subsidiary. In this arrangement, the US cannot compel us to do stuff to Chinese customers, and more importantly China cannot compel us to do things to US customers (and they spend a lot of effort compelling us to do all sorts of stuff to Chinese customers, it's ridiculous)
But as a customer, you'd have to take my word that things are set up this way, and our leadership won't cave to requests from either country to change this.
So for me, the questions I have involve whether Russia has any compelling control over Kaspersky USA products (their signature databases and access to uploaded samples, in particular). Also, where does the company stand in terms of Russian or Ukraine sympathy? Eugene already used minimizing language about this "situation" which projects a little bit of bias (honestly I wish he didn't say anything). That's not enough for me to guess what the company would do.
And yes, unfortunately like everything, this is political. Political with real implications though.
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