Senator Calls for FTC to Police Data-Selling After Avast Scandal

A day after an investigative report revealed that Avast, a leading maker of personal antivirus software, records its users’ online activity and then turns around and sells that data to giant corporations, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee blasted the Federal Trade Commission for falling down on the job when it comes to protecting internet user privacy. On Monday, the online magazines Motherboard and PCMag.com published the results of their investigation into Avast’s collection and sales of user data. The investigations found marketing materials from an Avast subsidiary that pledges to track users of the company’s software, recording “Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.” The company then packages the data and sells it to corporate clients including Google, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Home Depot and the corporate management consulting giant McKinsey. Though Avast claims that it “de-identifies” the data before selling it,  supposedly guarding user privacy, the PCMag/Motherboard investigation found that, in fact, the data collected and sold by Avast is in many cases so specific that it can be easily traced back to an individual user, even after that user’s personal information and IP address has been stripped away. The Avast software gathers data on “individual clicks users are making on their browsing sessions, including the time down to the millisecond,” PCMag reported. That means that buyers of the data could trace their own records back to discover which users engaged in the activities described in the data at the precise times contained in the data packages. Because the software claims to monitor “every click,” user activity on porn sites would be included in the data being collected and sold to many of the country’s largest and most powerful companies. As AVN.com has reported, some of the top internet companies—including Google and Facebook—already place tracking software on porn sites to harvest user data. “Time and again we’ve seen that consumers are totally unwitting to the ways their data is being collected, commercialized and sold,” Virginia Senator Mark Warner told Motherboard. "No consumer would realistically have an inkling that their antivirus software could be selling their browsing data.” Warner then criticized the FTC, which he said “hasn’t kept up with how these markets for data operate, and appears to be unwilling to use its authorities to do so.” An FTC spokesperson told Motherboard that it would neither confirm nor deny that it is investigating how Avast collects and sells user data. But in a statement, the FTC said that it was “very familiar with how these markets for data operate.” Other buyers of the Avast data have included Expedia, Intuit, Keurig, Condé Nast and L’Oréal. Microsoft said that it no longer has a relationship with the company, as far as acquiring user data goes. Photo By Avast Software / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain