It's important to us that users understand that we're listening to concerns about transparency and data use, and striving to do better in this area,” the security vendor adds.

Further to this, Avast Online Security is available for download from the Mozilla and Chrome stores. “We made changes to our extensions including limiting the use of data and these changes are explained clearly in our Privacy Policy. The company doesn’t specifically mention the privacy changes that it introduced in the updated versions of its extensions, but says they can all be find in its Privacy Policy. We are listening to our users and acknowledge that we need to be more transparent about what data is necessary for our security products to work, and to give them a choice in whether they wish to share their data further and for what purpose,” Avast says. We are committed to the security and privacy of personal data. “Privacy is our top priority and the discussion about what is best practice in dealing with data is an ongoing one in the tech industry. In a statement for Softpedia, Avast insists that it’s listening to user feedback and improving its products accordingly. Softpedia can confirm that installing these extensions works correctly in both Firefox and Chrome. According to estimates made by Softpedia based on Avast’s earnings reports, Avast makes more than $40 million every year by selling user data collected by its extensions.Īvast worked together with both Mozilla and Google to address the privacy concerns, and the extensions went live in both add-on stores once again this weekend.Īt the time of writing this article, the following extensions are available from the two add-on stores: The collected data was then sold by Avast to a series of customers, but Avast chief executive Ondrej Vlcek insisted this only happened after it was anonymized and aggregated. Palant discovered Avast and AVG extensions collected user information such as visited sites, search history, and other data that allowed the company to reproduce a browsing session. The issue was first brought to light by Wladimir Palant, the developer of AdBlock Plus, one of the top ad-blocking browser extensions these days.

The extensions were removed from both stores earlier this month – Mozilla pulled them in the first week of December, while Google did the same only a few days ago – due to the amount of data that it collected from users’ devices. Browser extensions developed by Avast and also launched under the AVG brand are now once again available for download from the official Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox add-on stores after the security company introduced a series of privacy updates.

Avast browser extension chrome