I'm not going to bore you with the whole conversation, but I did ask Gemini if there was a trade off regarding TrafficLight and disabling BD Encrypted web scan, as far as resources used and webpage loading.
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As expected.
When I used Avast 10 years ago, there was a setting called
HTTPS scanning. It was the first setting I disabled after installation as soon as I learned what it does. It really interesting to see antivirus companies, which are supposed to protect you from threats, hiding information about how it works and what it does exactly. I think AdGuard is the first company to
explained everything in details and I applaud them for that.
To those who don't want to read a lengthy article, AdGuard and any software in general that performs some kind of HTTPS scanning basically does man-in-the-middle attack. It installs its own certificate on your device, which web browsers blindly trusts and which allows the software to see all encrypted traffic between you and the website. Antivirus will then scan all the requests for malware and is supposed to encrypt connection back with its own SSL certificate. As AdGuard
mentions in their article, 2017 study showed that out of 26 tested antivirus software, 24 of them reduced connection security level and two-thirds created connection prone to hacking.
That explains why no antivirus companies explained the setting in details, and all have it enabled by default.
What are you talking about? There’s a difference between AV software having telemetry and abusing it the way Microsoft does.
How does Microsoft
abuse telemetry? Do you have any info we should know? If so, please post it here. I'd really like to know.
Because all I know is that Microsoft collects data, in plain text and no one knows exactly what they do with it. Their privacy policy is general for all products and terribly written without any additional details. And despite me not finding any proof they abuse it, just based on the fact they can't write privacy policy properly and per product along with secretly adding it into Windows 10, and then Windows 7 and 8.1, I don't trust it. Nonetheless, there's no proof they are doing something malicious with the data.
So if you have any knowledge about Microsoft abusing telemetry, please... post it.
Do you work for Microsoft? It strikes me how much you defend them—unless you’re on their payroll. I don’t defend multibillion-dollar corporations.
Based on what I wrote about Microsoft before, they'd never hire me.
And you got the wrong impression of me defending Microsoft. I'm not defending them, I'm not
Microsoft Defender. But I am a reasonable human being and will point out if someone is wrong. You can be mad, angry about my choices, but that won't change a thing. I know for a fact that Defender is a great product. Private? Not at all, but there are ways you can make it private. Especially in Enterprise and Education version. Just because Defender sucked in its previous releases, it doesn't mean it still sucks.
Remember McAfee how everyone spit on it, rightfully so? It became one of the beloved products here on forum. Yes, I was shocked too when I saw it.
And the latest Windows update caused drives to fill up with 500 GB of junk. Do you think that’s acceptable? Is that the user's fault? Or is it Microsoft's fault for releasing poor-quality updates? There’s a difference; Microsoft is the most valuable company on Earth—that’s no excuse for having such disastrous errors in its operating system. Antivirus companies don’t have the budget Microsoft has. Gen Digital, for instance—which is huge nowadays—isn’t even half as powerful as Microsoft.
I never said Microsoft is never wrong and that issues were always user's fault. The bad updates are on them, however, most of these bad updates are
preview updates. If you don't install those, you won't have any issues (unless you use 3rd party tools to modify how OS works). Why installation of such updates is not enabled by default. Windows Update should be left alone and that's it.
500 GB junk bug? You mean the bug that didn't
affect me as well as some other members of the forum? What a horrific bug! This only proves my point. Yes, Microsoft shouldn't have let go QA team, but users also shouldn't install every single update the second Windows offers them. Or use 3rd party tools to modify how the operating system works.
Feel free to use any antivirus software you want, I won't judge. I'll stick with Defender because I see no point in paying for something that will just sit in the background and do nothing. Just remember one thing; if you really knew your way around PCs and security, you wouldn't even need an antivirus software. I surfed the web for years without any antivirus software installed and I never got infection. I'm still saying; the only reason why I use Defender is because Windows kept nagging me to enable it. And no matter how I tried to disable it, it always came back to annoy me.
