The Antivirus maker AVG has announced its privacy policy in which the company informs users that it will collect and sell users’ personal data to advertisers.
If you think that there is something really free on the Internet you are probably wrong. Someone ask you to pay for their products and services, others use their customers data for commercial purposes.
The popular Antivirus maker AVG has announced its privacy policy in which the company informs users that it will collect and sell users’ data to online advertisers. This is a mechanism used by the firm to finance its free antivirus product.
The AVG’s policy will become effective from October 15, the company clarified that it will commercialize only “non-personal data” in order to “make money from our free offerings so we can keep them free.”
The company has published a blog post along with the full privacy policy to inform its customers.
AVG confirmed that it will not sell personal data which include name, email addresses, residential addresses, neither credit card details.
The term “non-personal data” could deceive you, AVG will collect from its users a lot of data that could help to profile them such as:
- Browsing History,
- Search History,
- Meta-data,
- Advertising ID associated with your device,
- Internet Service Provider (ISP) or Mobile Network you use to connect to AVG products,
- Information regarding other apps you have on your device.
The new policy enlarges the spectrum of data collected by the firm, previous policies allowed it to collect only information related to online researchers and information related the malicious code that infected the machine.
Unfortunately, some personal data are often present in the browsing history, so AVG have to filter it before selling it.
This data could include also personally identifiable data like addresses, IPs and age.
Bad time for the utopian user’s privacy.
(Security Affairs – AVG, privacy)
