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Avast is now officially spyware - selling user data!

Furiku

You mean there's people who don't have a MalwareBytes paid subscription?

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2 minutes ago, rcmaehl said:

You mean there's people who don't have a MalwareBytes paid subscription?

Considering that its detection scores are lower than the built in Windows Defender, I hope no one does.

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22 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

It was proven several times that MS wont admit anything until someone lights a bone fire under their butt..... So that doc is pretty much useless.

ATP is a paid only service included in only the highest enterprise and academic Office 365 plans or you pay extra outside of your plan to gain the licenses for it, even then it's not just on you have to manually turn it on. Microsoft stays quite far away from pissing off corporate clients if they can, ATP also has to be GDPR complaint too.

 

Windows Defender and ATP are different things, highly unlikely anyone here is using a PC with ATP active including at work.

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1 hour ago, captain_to_fire said:

Can't find the one for Windows Defender for consumers. I was thinking they have the same privacy policy considering that both have the same scanning engine and they feed off the same cloud component.

Not at all, ATP is an entirely different service with it's own resources behind it to offer all those extra things Defender does not and the data is stored in your own Azure subscription, not in some generic Microsoft thing. It's a bit like Hotmail/Outlook Live versus Office 365 Exchange Online, equally different things.

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Well good news for me I'm living in the land of Malwarebytes! 

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19 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Not at all, ATP is an entirely different service with it's own resources behind it to offer all those extra things Defender does not and the data is stored in your own Azure subscription, not in some generic Microsoft thing. It's a bit like Hotmail/Outlook Live versus Office 365 Exchange Online, equally different things.

I thought ATP is mostly a service on top of Windows Defender for workstations running Windows 10 E3 or E5 that reports and correlates security events from endpoints back to the IT staff as well as manage detection sensitivity, blacklist/whitelist websites, mark USB flash drives as read only or block them all together, etc. [here] Looking at the documentation it looks like their general threat detection rules and signatures come from the same cloud service for both consumers and enterprise. But yeah, there are indeed more advanced features that ATP has over the consumer defender.

 

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I see the soul that is inside

 

 

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1 hour ago, maartendc said:

Not true, Windows Defender actually ranks very highly, among the top, in independent antivirus tests.

 

https://www.av-test.org/en/

 

In any case, no antivirus is 100% foolproof, you still need to use common sense. If you click every link in every suspicious e-mail you get, for sure sooner or later you will be out of luck, antivirus or no.

Ranks are void because they get payed to make those rankings.

Windows Defender could not stop a simple rootkit hooking into services.exe inside system32 folder on my mothers PC when she installed some crap software (windows 10 -v1909, new laptop)

Windows has too many flaws and points of attack and it cannot be safe by default. Its unsafe by design, contrary Android is safe by design because you have strict permissions access, strict process isolation and 0 access to system files/directories. Even if you give permission to read/write to an app it cannot access everything only public folders.

 

Nothing is 100% safe and it cannot be, but the design of Windows does not allow safety, if i lock down the system to a standard controlled account + group polcies where only the admin can do critical  changes then you cant do much on it without admin access this design is good for office/servers maybe but for end user it is not. Android/iOS design is good where you can freely install/configure apps from store give/revoke app permissions and have high safety by default since those apps can use all the API's ,software and hardware as intended without being able to destroy system files or hijack the device, at least not easily.

On windows... if you double clicked .exe goodbye OS,safey and privacy... thats because on windows accessing many of windows functionality from code requires access to system files which is retarded, as long as windows doesnt have a safe abrastaction, an API to access its functionality there will be no safety, and if they made one now all old apps would cease to function because of how random they access various windows files, system and folders. 

UWP on the other hand forces developers to make apps ONE way, instead of being a simpler safe API that any old software can implement, you are forced as developer to rewrite everything UWP way. And its a terrible slow API/framework.

I see no solution or future to windows, i hope eventually other OS'es like android, harmony OS, or a prevalent linux distro will become mature and flexible enough to take over desktop, otherwise we will be stuck forever like this.

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1 hour ago, leadeater said:

ATP is a paid only service included in only the highest enterprise and academic Office 365 plans or you pay extra outside of your plan to gain the licenses for it, even then it's not just on you have to manually turn it on. Microsoft stays quite far away from pissing off corporate clients if they can, ATP also has to be GDPR complaint too.

 

Windows Defender and ATP are different things, highly unlikely anyone here is using a PC with ATP active including at work.

You think so? How was with telemtry? Even server wasnt able to disable it? 9_9  Sorry but with a track record like this id say anything that comes from them cannot be trusted.

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Ew

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I stopped using avast when they started offering all kinds of SHEET with the application from registry cleaners to safe browsers etc.... and the stupid pop up ads about new features or upgrade packages were also a major contributing factor. Now if I'm not sure about a file/url i upload it to virustotal.com and about once a month a full scan with superantispyware and malwarebytes works just fine for me.

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6 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

You think so? How was with telemtry? Even server wasnt able to disable it? 9_9  Sorry but with a track record like this id say anything that comes from them cannot be trusted.

Yes I am very sure of the difference between ATP and Defender since we do actually use it and I know how it works, we have Office 365 A5 licenses. But then again I bet you have zero trust in the entirety of Azure so saying anything at all will be fruitless endeavor. Microsoft isn't in the business of annoying paying corporate customers.

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8 hours ago, captain_to_fire said:

I thought ATP is mostly a service on top of Windows Defender for workstations running Windows 10 E3 or E5 that reports and correlates security events from endpoints back to the IT staff as well as manage detection sensitivity, blacklist/whitelist websites, mark USB flash drives as read only or block them all together, etc. [here] Looking at the documentation it looks like their general threat detection rules and signatures come from the same cloud service for both consumers and enterprise. But yeah, there are indeed more advanced features that ATP has over the consumer defender.

Yes ATP does tie in to Defender but the services themselves are separated for those data security reasons. Data is feed back to Microsoft to assist with there core Defender AV but that's only file signature data that's flagged as suspicious or malicious as well as behavior and trend data so Microsoft is able to detect outbreaks and how they spread, or try and stop it.

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12 hours ago, Geoff35674567 said:

How did you think these "free" antivirus made their money?

By constantly pestering you to upgrade to their paid version that has more features then the free version (the free version wouldn't be their only version).

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So, if AVG and Avast are garbage, what to do for legit free virus protection?

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1 hour ago, atxcyclist said:

So, if AVG and Avast are garbage, what to do for legit free virus protection?

Windows Defender + malware bytes is what I endorse

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Quote

"there’s no privacy scandal here. All that user information that it sells cannot be traced back to individual users"

Be kind of nice if it didn't sell information at all but that's cool, you do you

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2 hours ago, atxcyclist said:

So, if AVG and Avast are garbage, what to do for legit free virus protection?

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6 hours ago, leadeater said:

 Microsoft isn't in the business of annoying paying corporate customers.

Quickest way to not only lose those paying customers and make the entire industry think twice before buying into a product/service.

 

Also  no evidence has ever surfaced that MS is selling user data or collecting more data than their privacy policy outlines.  What they have shown is that you can't anonymize personal data because by it's very nature it identifies people,   and that MS don't give consumers enough upfront information to make an informed decision during install/update. 

 

 

Grammar and spelling is not indicative of intelligence/knowledge.  Not having the same opinion does not always mean lack of understanding.  

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21 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Worth noting that Avast Firefox extension was recently banned by Mozilla too.

The author of AdBlock Plus found that it tracked pretty much everything you did in your browser, far more than what's necessary for security purposes. For example it tracked when you switched tab focus too and sent that data back to Avast, possibly to track how much time you spent reading for example an article, and all this data was sent back to Avast with a unique user ID.

 

You can read about it here:

https://palant.de/2019/10/28/avast-online-security-and-avast-secure-browser-are-spying-on-you/

 

Interesting, that gives a lot of legitimacy to this imo.  I noticed this thread last night and found it intriguing but wanted to give it time to settle and see if it comes out that it was nothing blown out of proportion or misinterpreted or if it was actually what it claims to be at face value.  Unfortunately I guess it is the latter.

 

Edit: To add to this, I suppose this really should have been a sign of things to come.  I see the date on that article is from end of October, long before the one in the OP.  I wonder why this didn't get more attention at the time.

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7 hours ago, atxcyclist said:

So, if AVG and Avast are garbage, what to do for legit free virus protection?

I wonder how is Avira doing these days?

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17 hours ago, yian88 said:

Ranks are void because they get payed to make those rankings.

Windows Defender could not stop a simple rootkit hooking into services.exe inside system32 folder on my mothers PC when she installed some crap software (windows 10 -v1909, new laptop)

Windows has too many flaws and points of attack and it cannot be safe by default. Its unsafe by design, contrary Android is safe by design because you have strict permissions access, strict process isolation and 0 access to system files/directories. Even if you give permission to read/write to an app it cannot access everything only public folders.

 

Nothing is 100% safe and it cannot be, but the design of Windows does not allow safety, if i lock down the system to a standard controlled account + group polcies where only the admin can do critical  changes then you cant do much on it without admin access this design is good for office/servers maybe but for end user it is not. Android/iOS design is good where you can freely install/configure apps from store give/revoke app permissions and have high safety by default since those apps can use all the API's ,software and hardware as intended without being able to destroy system files or hijack the device, at least not easily.

On windows... if you double clicked .exe goodbye OS,safey and privacy... thats because on windows accessing many of windows functionality from code requires access to system files which is retarded, as long as windows doesnt have a safe abrastaction, an API to access its functionality there will be no safety, and if they made one now all old apps would cease to function because of how random they access various windows files, system and folders. 

UWP on the other hand forces developers to make apps ONE way, instead of being a simpler safe API that any old software can implement, you are forced as developer to rewrite everything UWP way. And its a terrible slow API/framework.

I see no solution or future to windows, i hope eventually other OS'es like android, harmony OS, or a prevalent linux distro will become mature and flexible enough to take over desktop, otherwise we will be stuck forever like this.

Lol, sure, everything is rigged. Let's not do any testing of anything, because it's all "paid for".

 

Also, I can't tell whether you are upset at Windows Defender or Windows itself. Two different things. In your opinion, Windows is unsafe regardless of your antivirus option, so what are you even talking about?

 

Windows has gone a long way towards improving security with UAC and popping up alerts every time an app wants to make changes. If your user is dumb enough to click "agree" and "accept" to every prompt, no amount of OS security can save you.

 

Even on Android, scammers get users to install things outside of the app store and get their device compromised. It doesn't matter if your security is 100% waterproof. If your dumb user picks up the phone and provides their password and 2-factor authentication codes to a scammer, you are out of luck.

 

Teach your mother not to download and install random .exe's or clicking every scam e-mail instead of blaming Windows.

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