More privacy concerns if you’re an AVG user, as the the company has announced an update to its privacy policies alerting users that it’ll be selling their browsing and search histories to online advertisers. Hence, if you’re looking forward to get an AVGs free subscription, be prepared to sacrifice your privacy. The reason being that the Czech firm wants to generate more revenue by selling your ‘non personal data’ to third parties. The company says that it’ll be using the revenue generated to fund its free products and services to users.
“We use data to improve those products and services; provide support; send notifications, offers, and promotions; and to make money from our free offerings so that we can continue to offer them for free,” explains AVG.
Apart from non-personal data, the company also says it’ll be collecting device information such as password attributes and encryption levels, along with information about where the company’s products and services were used such as location, zip code, area code, timezone, along with URL links via which users came to know about its products.
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The company however says it’ll be taking all the precautionary measures to keep users’ personal data safe. AVG claims it will not sell information such as emails, credit card details, names, address etc, though there’s always that risk factor as this information may stay in a user’s browsing data and accidentally get leaked.
The Czech based company also adds that it’ll take protective measures to further analyze a user’s personal data from their browsing history before selling the non-personal information to third party vendors. Hence, if the data collected make a user identifiable, for instance browsing history or search terms considered personal will be immediately scrapped.
However, the company has been rather transparent about the new policy, and users will have the option to accept or reject the sale of their data for a free product. Further instructions will be provided when the new privacy policy goes into effect starting October 15.
“Without privacy online, there can be no security; and without security, there can be no trust. At AVG, we value our customers and believe they should know exactly how their information is being used by us,” said Harvey Anderson., Chief Legal Officer at AVG.
