Avast AV potential privacy violator?

[Kulin]

Just installed the free version of AVAST av.

By default it sends ALL of your traffic to it's servers for scanning for
viruses.

Makes no never mind how much trust or respect you place in an AV company
this is a real hazard to privacy and worse. You can disable their
network scans and web scans but to have these services forward all your
data by default is a huge no no imo. I guess you can run all you data
through tor or similar to defeat their potential ability to spy on your
traffic, get your passwords, etc.

 

[Bear]

Just installed the free version of AVAST av.

By default it sends ALL of your traffic to it's servers for scanning for
viruses.

Makes no never mind how much trust or respect you place in an AV company
this is a real hazard to privacy and worse. You can disable their
network scans and web scans but to have these services forward all your
data by default is a huge no no imo. I guess you can run all you data
through tor or similar to defeat their potential ability to spy on your
traffic, get your passwords, etc.

It's called Cloud services which makes more sense for security updates than
any use of the Cloud. You basically get immediate updates to malware as it
is found by any computer in the cloud.

I would recommend not using such a software or service of that type if you
are concerned about how that info may be potentially harvested or used by
that company.

Cloud security makes sense to me.

 

[p-0-0-h the cat]

You basically get immediate updates to malware as it
is found by any computer in the cloud.

Er! yeah, it's important to keep your malware updated. <blink>

 

[Kulin]

Just installed the free version of AVAST av.

By default it sends ALL of your traffic to it's servers for scanning for
viruses.

I must be misunderstanding you. Are you saying that if you download
a 100 megabyte file containing a zip file of some application you
want to install, that avast will send all 100 megabytes to their
server?

 

[Rich Webb]

I must be misunderstanding you. Are you saying that if you download
a 100 megabyte file containing a zip file of some application you
want to install, that avast will send all 100 megabytes to their
server?

It's an optional feature (Settings | Cloud Services | Reputation
Services) that would send identifying information about that 100 MB file
(presumably name, size, hash) to compare against a real-time database of
known good and un-good files.

Presumably one benefit is if an update started throwing false positives
on, say, c:\windows\explorer.exe, the "FileRep" score would be able to
say "Eh, probably not malware."

It does not send all of one's traffic to their servers for scanning.
That would be pretty goofy, eh?

A brief, non-technical description at
<http://www.avast.com/pr-avast-software-detection-is-faster-when-filerep-knows-all-the-clean-files>

 

[Nomen Nescio]

It's an optional feature (Settings | Cloud Services | Reputation
Services) that would send identifying information about that 100 MB file
(presumably name, size, hash) to compare against a real-time database of
known good and un-good files.

Presumably one benefit is if an update started throwing false positives
on, say, c:\windows\explorer.exe, the "FileRep" score would be able to
say "Eh, probably not malware."

It does not send all of one's traffic to their servers for scanning.
That would be pretty goofy, eh?

A brief, non-technical description at
<http://www.avast.com/pr-avast-software-detection-is-faster-when-filerep-knows-all-the-clean-files>

Perhaps you should take a better look at one of the alternatives you have
available. I find "AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 2012" to be an outstanding
program for this purpose. Among its many advantages is the one that allows
you the option during installation to disenable the very feature you
objected to, on multiple levels.

 

[Noone]

Perhaps you should take a better look at one of the alternatives you
have available. I find "AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 2012" to be an
outstanding program for this purpose. Among its many advantages is the
one that allows you the option during installation to disenable the
very feature you objected to, on multiple levels.

I am very troubled by this. I opened the Avast interface and watched the
web- and network-shields do their stuff as I opened several sites in my
browser. But I can evidently disable this "real time" web and network
"shield" scanning. Would this be a real fix?