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.
They definitely made more than that selling data what a fucking joke
F*C fines are just protection money payments.
This is fucking garbage.
When a company gets caught with their hand in the cookie jar, it’s not a punishment to put one of the cookies back.
Fines should be ten TIMES what the company made from their misbehaviour, not ten percent.
Jesus Christ.
Remember when Google’s Motto was “Don’t be Evil” It was supposed to be a jab at Microsoft, but it feels like every year tech companies find news ways to just be fucking evil.
PS. Google kind of fails to live up to that motto too, I don’t even know if it’s still an official motto.
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No, they didn’t. Alphabet was created as a parent company in 2015 and uses the similarly vague “Do the right thing” in their code of conduct. Google itself still has “Don’t be evil” in their code of conduct, unchanged. Google needed Alphabet to not be Google (or they’d get fined to hell) so having everything identical wouldn’t have been a smart idea.
That this easily Google-able myth is so pervasive is a wonderful microcosm about online gullibility and laziness.
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Love the vibe and energy against pretense for pretense sakes, but your source makes you seem demented as it literally repeats exactly what they said if you read it.
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I too love blocking people who make reading this place shittier.
And I’m sure that fine was as high or higher than the profit they made from the data… what, it wasn’t?!
Cybersec company ❌
Advertisement/Data mining ✔️
Do we know how much money they made on it? If it was more than $16.5 then it was still a good step on their balance sheet.
This stuff needs to be fined at the full income they made from the tool plus some penalty. Corporations only care about their balance sheets.
Five years ago, I posted on Reddit about how Avast had installed a browser without my consent and set it as default while I was out of town and away from my computer. That post has had comments added to it several times a year ever since, meaning that they’re still trying that nonsense. They stole my data without my consent by importing all of my browser data, and now it’s come out that they blatantly sold it without my consent as well.
I said it then, and I say it now: If you install something without my knowledge or consent, you’re a virus, plain and simple.
Cost of doing business
$16.5 million is not even a slap on the wrist
This is a careful reminder to be VERY SCEPTICAL about not only “anti-viruses” (like bro, Windows defender is good enough), but also browsers. There is a high probability that the company is either a data broker or fintech… looking at you, Opera.
I tried Windows Defender a couple of years ago for an entire year. I thought it was dog water. The anti-ransomeware feature was the only nice thing about it. I now use BitDefender.
What are you clicking on all day?
At least once every 6 months I come across a top Google result trying to download malicious scripts. The web searches are innocent, eg. “Iso standard metric thread” or “bee keeper hive monitor”, which are both search terms in the past where a top result had malicious scripts.
Sounds like you need the noscript browser extension instead.
Sounds like a horrible internet experience. No thanks.
Nah it’s pretty good. Just a little rough at first as you whitelist the websites you go to. After that they all load quicker since you’re blocking a bunch of tracking and advertising sites.
And people still think they can trust password managers lmao
