AVG’s New Privacy Policies Allow Them To Sell Your Data

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I haven’t used AVG since I was in college back in 2010 and it was the free version I ended up getting and in the days before privacy this may not have been so much of an issue. However, these days — if ever — no one enjoys seeing their data sold to third parties, but it appears AVG has no problem doing so in order to keep its antivirus software free.

While at MWC this year, Gary Kovacs, CEO of AVG went out and said that it would take 76 days to read the entire privacy policy. That’s nice, as it’ll now be one page instead of having everyone scroll down and click on the accept button, but in that one page it lets you know what kind of data is collected. AVG states non-personal data is collected, but can’t pinpoint which type of data is collected from the user. Data is collected for malware threats to each of your devices, how you use AVG, your devices information (manufacturer), browsing history, ISP or mobile provider, and other applications you have on your devices. Just wait, there’s a little more.

Continuing on with your devices, device security information such as encryption levels and password attributes are collected. Information as to where the device is, is also collected. That includes the area code, zip code, approximate location, time zone and what URL you used to get to AVG. The plus side to all this is that AVG states that if any of the information they gather is able to identify you, it will be removed.

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“We may also aggregate and/or anonymize personal data we collect about you. For instance, although we would consider your precise location to be personal data if stored separately, if we combined the locations of our users into a data set that could only tell us how many users were located in a particular country, we would not consider this aggregated information to be personally identifiable.”

Some data that is considered “personal” will not be sold to third parties, but can be shared with companies that work with AVG depending on the country and laws. As for the information that isn’t considered “personal,” it will be offered to third parties and displayed publicly.

This will go into effect on Thursday, Oct. 15; so you will have plenty of time to make a decision as to whether to keep using AVG or a different antivirus software. You will also have the option to opt out of it if you wish, but you’ll have to wait until the new policies are out next month.

If you’re running the free version of the antivirus software, will you continue to use it now that you’re data will be sold? Let us know by leaving your comments below, or on Google +, Facebook, or Twitter.

[button link=”http://www.zdnet.com/article/avg-releases-transparent-privacy-policy-yes-we-will-sell-your-data/SO” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: ZDNet[/button]

Last Updated on November 27, 2018.

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