Jumpshot claimed that no “Personal Identifying Information” was included in the data they sold, but many experts were not convinced.Īccording to the investigation, Jumpshot’s data contained every click performed by Avast Online Security users along with time stamps (accurate to the millisecond), country, city, and zip code information from users’ IP addresses.
It lists out the corporations that purchased data from Jumpshot along with whistleblower testimony and leaked internal documents from Avast and Jumpshot. Palant was a driving force behind this revelation, but the nail in Jumpshot’s coffin was this article by VICE Motherboard, published in early 2020.
The source of Jumpshot’s user data was the spyware embedded in Avast and AVG’s Online Security Browser extensions. Jumpshot’s public information was very vague, but they claimed to have obtained “clickstream data from 100 million online shoppers and 40 million app users”. In 2013, Avast acquired Jumpshot, a company that aggregated “anonymous” user data and sold that data to online businesses. Avast Subsidiary Sold User Data For Millions of Dollars in Profit Then came the disclosure that this data was being sold to big corporate clients like Home Depot, Google, and Pepsi, through an Avast subsidiary called Jumpshot. While Avast claimed that data collection was a necessary part of the Online Security plugin, browser extensions from competing brands seemed to work fine without collecting and retaining such a large amount of personal information. In October 2019, he posted the incriminating information to his blog with a detailed explanation of how he claims Avast was able to “transmit data that allows reconstructing your entire web browsing history and much of your browsing behavior.”Įssentially, Avast and AVG’s Online Security extensions were recording their users’ every click - documenting which websites were visited, when, and from where.
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Wladimir Palant - the founder of Adblock Plus - was the first person to sound the alarm about Avast’s predatory practices. Here’s How Avast Allegedly Spied on Its Users for the Last 7 Years At the end of the day, any company that faces such severe allegations has lost our faith and cannot receive our seal of approval. The SafetyDetectives team has carefully considered our decision to scrub Avast from our website over the next several weeks. Three months later, Avast shut down a subsidiary company, Jumpshot, in the wake of investigative reports documenting the sale of personal data from around 100 million users, all gained through improper user surveillance. The Avast Online Security browser extension was deleted from Mozilla, Chrome, and Opera marketplaces in December 2019 after claims that it was gathering a suspicious amount of user data - not only every website visited, but also user location, search history, age, gender, social media identities, and even personal shipping information. Why? Because Avast - which also owns AVG - has been caught in a firestorm of controversy over the last several months regarding serious allegations of unethical business practices. Well, after a lot of consideration and back and forth between departments, we’ve decided to finally remove them from all of our lists. Our readers have been messaging us and asking why we’re still ranking Avast and AVG on our website, despite them being caught up in a serious scandal. Why Ethical Violations by Antivirus Companies Are Especially Serious.US Senators and Investigative Journalists Held Avast Accountable.Here’s How Avast Allegedly Spied on Its Users for the Last 7 Years.
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