Anti-Virus Giant Avast Shutters Porn-Data Tracker Jumpshot

Just four days after a major investigative report revealed the Czech Republic-based anti-virus software giant Avast had collected and sold massive amounts of user data down to the most “granular” details of its customers’ online activities, as AVN.com reported, the company said Friday that it would shut down the subsidiary that actually gathered, packaged and sold the user data. Pledging to its giant corporate clients—including Google, Microsoft, Pepsi and others—to record its users’ “every search, every click, every buy, on every site,” the subsidiary known as Jumpshot could even track the precise times “down to the millisecond” a user visited any particular porn site, and the precise adult content the user downloaded or viewed, and for how long, according to a New York Post report. Though Avast and Jumpshot claimed that they took strict measures to make the identities of users untraceable from the data, the investigation by Motherboard and PCMag showed that due to the precision of the data, companies could easily identify the original users with some simple cyber-sleuthing. The scandal exposed “the very real connection between how some security technology runs the risk of stepping over the boundary into violations of privacy,” according to TechCrunch. But in a Friday online statement, Avast “announced plans” to “wind down” Jumpshot. “The bottom line is that any practices that jeopardize user trust are unacceptable to Avast,” said CEO Ondrej Vlcek, in the statement. “We are vigilant about our users’ privacy, and we took quick action to begin winding down Jumpshot’s operations after it became evident that some users questioned the alignment of data provision to Jumpshot with our mission and principles that define us as a Company.” But the statement did not say exactly when the “winding down” would be complete, and when the data collection and selling operation would cease. The statement said, ambiguously, that Jumpshot “will be promptly notifying its customers in due course” about the end of its data selling operation. Photo by Chief Photographer Defense Imagery / Wikimedia Commons