Avast Caught Selling User Data to Google, Pepsi and Microsoft
The most popular Antivirus program of the time, Avast, is said to sell the data of users to business and tech giants such as the Home Depot, Google, Pepsi and Microsoft in accordance with a report by PCMag and Motherboard.
The organizations received the data from their antivirus program and collected them over their parent organization, Jumpshot, who managed the information and then sold it against million dollars. Although people gave consent for data sharing to Avast, yet were unaware that their data is getting sold further by Jumpshot.
The investigators were able to list down all of the organizations who were the buyers of Jumpshot; Intuit, Loreal, Expedia, Kuerig, Conde Nast and more were discovered. The aspect of concern in this whole scenario is that the data involves highly sensitive information including; Google Maps location searches, YouTube video visits, their Google searches, Companies LinkedIn pages activities and also, their visits over adult entertainment websites.
According to Digital Phablet’s correspondent, Jumpshot was paid $2,075,000 by Omnicom for the data access in the year 2019. It appears that the information is anonymous and it doesn’t involve personal details but, experts have recommended that there will be probability in figuring out the certain information concerning the users.
