Avast is selling your internet habits
Jumpshot counts MNCs such as Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, McKinsey and Home Depot as its clients
Popular free antivirus program Avast, which is used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, is selling highly sensitive web browsing data to many of world’s biggest companies, a joint investigation by Motherboard and PCMag revealed.
The report adds to a Forbes report, which first revealed the existence of the subsidiary, Jumpshot.
According to the report, which managed to get hold of leaked documents, the sale of this data is both highly sensitive and is in many cases supposed to remain confidential between the firm selling the data and the clients purchasing it.
The documents not only throw new light on the secretive sale and supply chain of people’s internet browsing histories, it also revealed that the antivirus program collects user data.
Jumpshot then repackages the data into different products to sell them to some of the largest firms in the world. Some past, present, and potential clients include Google, Yelp, Microsoft, McKinsey, Pepsi, Sephora, Home Depot, Condé Nast, Intuit, and many others. Some clients paid millions of dollars for products that include a socalled ‘All Clicks Feed’, which can track user behaviour, clicks, and movement across websites in highly precise detail.
Avast, which also owns the AVG antivirus, claims to have more than 435 million active users per month, and Jumpshot says it has data from 100 million devices.
The company said the data is collected from users that opt-in and there is ‘no privacy scandal’.
Multiple Avast users told they were not aware Avast sold browsing data, raising questions about how informed that consent is.
The leaked data includes Google searches, lookups of locations and GPS coordinates on Google Maps, people visiting companies’ LinkedIn pages, particular YouTube videos, and people visiting porn websites.
It is possible to determine from the collected data what date and time the anonymised user visited YouPorn and PornHub, and in some cases what search term they entered into the porn site and which specific video they watched.
Although the data does not include personal information such as users’ names, it still contains a wealth of specific browsing data, and experts say it could be possible to deanonymise certain users.
In a release from July, Jumpshot claims to be “the only company that unlocks walled garden data” and seeks to “provide marketers with deeper visibility into the entire online customer journey.”
In October, AdBlock Plus creator Wladimir Palant published a blog post showing that Avast harvest user data with that plugin. Shortly after, Mozilla, Opera, and Google removed Avast’s and AVG’s extensions from their respective browser extension stores.