I suppose that this question or similar is being asked nearly daily here, but i am not questioning which antivirusscanner is the best. i have Avast anti virus free edition installed now on my new pc (win 10), and this seems to be the most detailed av i could find. i know of kaspersky free but i just seem to like avast more. anyways, now whilst browsing for av and which one is assumed best by majority i came upon a lot of backlash against avast anti virus and i do not really understand this. Avast is rated very high in av tests, and it is free. i know malwarebytes also has a free version, but that is not my topic now. since installation, a couple of weeks ago avast has found a couple of things, yes two false positives (quakechampions.exe lol) and a couple of other things i dont know what they are but they are in the virus vault now. every scanner has false positives somewhere, so avast is nothing new on this topic. though, why are so many people negative about avast in reviews or comments ?
Avast / AVG were caught stealing and selling user’s info.
Do you know how to use Google, son?
They use very agressive marketing techniques and sell user data. Basically an anti-consumer company.
Feel free to use Avast now. They’re trying to undo the mistakes of the past. After installing Avast, go into settings then personal privacy and uncheck all the options except community IQ if you haven’t already. I actually prefer AVG’s UI to Avast but they are the same product underneath.
Beside privacy concerns, I uninstalled Avast after many annoying popups. In my opinion they try to sell you their products in any possible situation.
You don’t have a VPN? Your computer is in danger!
That doesn’t mean, that it isn’t effective against malware, but not a product that I would recommend to friends who are not that familiar with computers.
If you look at bitdefender, even the free version is not asking once for a full version. It will ONLY notify you, when it found something malicious.
In my opinion…
> Avast Anti-virus is resource intensive.
> Slow scan speed (Deep Scan | Ultra Settings | 144 FPS Mode)
> Sells Your Data (Privacy Whore)
read it. but i must say i can live with this advertising based collection of data on my gaming-only pc as long as they dont store or collect really important data like passwords or logins to websites or services, it is a bit of a downer to me they do this anyways. but this is no real reason for me to uninstall my avast from my pc now, since google is doing something like this too and also facebook and all those big companies even microsoft i believe and i must say - targeted personalised ads are completely wrong in my browser youtube or whatever i see 90% of the ads are not targeted to me as it seems when i browse around the net on any of my machines. dont know what they are doing with this data because when i look at it this way it looks suspicious they are collecting private data for other purposes which i dont know what they are for then. - i hardly ever see ads which seem to be related to my browsing history or youtube videos watched - which is also very odd given that i read about the hassle companies take to get such data legally. they offer me a free av which works okay and i fear i must comply with this, regular av costs extra money.
Actually they weren’t “caught” because they openly stated they are collecting the data. It’s just that no one reads the fucking EULA, not even in a shortened condensed versions. And then there was so much outcry and bitching they just shut down that operation because it was easier than dealing with clueless morons who can’t read. Plus, one could uncheck the things under Privacy settings.
And avast! isn’t the only victim of clueless idiots. Kaspersky few years ago had similar fate, but for different reasons. Kaspersky got accused of “spying” on Muricans who never ever do any spying and all that, resulting in Kaspersky getting banned from American gov systems. As it turns out, the reason for it was Kaspersky’s cloud protection system (KSN) spotted a hacking tool on a system of one NSA’s contractor. And then they wrapped it like Kaspersky was the bad guy even though they just spotted the “malware” which is literally their primary operation.
So, to get back to the original topic, if you feel you don’t trust avast! anymore after that, then so be it, but spreading around bullshit information 1 year after all the drama is just stupid. Also that mention of Google is the ultimate cherry on top. They hoard data and mention that just the same avast! has on both counts. Except with Google it’s fine, but with avast! it was global outcry. There was also bunch of talking how one could extrapolate info from the collected data, everyone was loud about it and then big fucking nothing happened when I asked for any kind of proof about that. Just bunch of “it could theoretically technically be maybe possible”. Rolleyes. avast! is still a great choice and if you like its features, just use it.
bro no way. what (Type of) and data did they collect ?
One more thing. Avast’s real time protection don’t detect PUP by default. A manual scan will detect them but not the real time protection. So I recommend to enable that from settings. There’s another option to boost sensitivity from medium to high which improves its behavior blocker. It may cause false positives so don’t tweak that if you don’t feel like it. But I haven’t seen any false positives due to this yet and it improved its malware detection by a significant margin in my testing.
If you didn’t know, Avast also has a feature called Hardened mode. It blocks every exe files that’s not trusted by Avast. Common programs will work without any problem but if something unknown is executed then it’ll be blocked. This is for paranoid users or useful for PC used by family members who are happy clickers/not tech savvy.
Hope this helps.
ip adresses , really ? what are they up to
thanks i will look into it later this day !
And why do we bash Avast so much but not Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft?