1018
Avast fined $16.5 million for ‘privacy’ software that actually sold users’ browsing data
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
1018 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
65966 readers
6862 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If the software is free, but not open source, it's harvesting your data. How else do you think these companies stay in business?
The only way to fully prevent it is to remove the profit-motive altogether.
Yeah I love it when people say "if you don't pay you are the product" as if paying for youtube premium, google one, reddit premium or spotify will stop them from harvesting your data haha that's how naive we were back when we thought data was collected only for ads.
Free my ass! Avast charges money for that service. Hell they make you subscribe to use any service outside basic virus scan. So customers paid to have their data stolen and sold.
I dislike this sentiment. Just because something is FOSS or open source, doesn't mean it's not harvesting your data or doing something nefarious.
kinda wrong sentiment to get from the statement. statement is only saying if
if free and NOT open source > data harvest
it doesn't necessarily imply that
if free and open source > doesnt data harvest
at all. its just you have the ability to find out via code of they do or not. thats more or less in the boat of logical paradoxes you can make.
A good example would be Yuzu (the Switch emulator), it was open source and collected so much telemetry that Nintendo might go after their users.
This might be fear tactic but it shows you that you aren't safe
I don't know about Yuzu's data collection but they were destroyed because they existed.
So companies like Proton and BitWarden are harvesting your data with their free tiers?
I haven't looked into Proton, but BitWarden is open source both server side and client side.
Proton is open source as well. Free tiers are supplemented by subscribers. https://proton.me/support/proton-plans#proton-free