Avast, the cybersecurity software company, is facing a $16.5 million fine after it was caught storing and selling customer information without their consent. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the fine on Thursday and said that it’s banning Avast from selling user data for advertising purposes.

      • prole
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        211 year ago

        The only way to fully prevent it is to remove the profit-motive altogether.

      • @[email protected]
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        81 year ago

        Yeah I love it when people say “if you don’t pay you are the product” as if paying for youtube premium, google one, reddit premium or spotify will stop them from harvesting your data haha that’s how naive we were back when we thought data was collected only for ads.

    • @[email protected]
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      301 year ago

      Free my ass! Avast charges money for that service. Hell they make you subscribe to use any service outside basic virus scan. So customers paid to have their data stolen and sold.

    • @[email protected]
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      201 year ago

      I dislike this sentiment. Just because something is FOSS or open source, doesn’t mean it’s not harvesting your data or doing something nefarious.

      • @[email protected]
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        231 year ago

        kinda wrong sentiment to get from the statement. statement is only saying if

        if free and NOT open source > data harvest

        it doesn’t necessarily imply that

        if free and open source > doesnt data harvest

        at all. its just you have the ability to find out via code of they do or not. thats more or less in the boat of logical paradoxes you can make.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        A good example would be Yuzu (the Switch emulator), it was open source and collected so much telemetry that Nintendo might go after their users.

        This might be fear tactic but it shows you that you aren’t safe

        • Chris
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          31 year ago

          I don’t know about Yuzu’s data collection but they were destroyed because they existed.