1006
Avast fined $16.5 million for ‘privacy’ software that actually sold users’ browsing data
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
1006 points (99.3% liked)
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If the software is free, but not open source, it's harvesting your data. How else do you think these companies stay in business?
If you pay tho they're also harvesting your data. And if you don't use your service they make a ghost profile and harvest that data.
The only way to fully prevent it is to remove the profit-motive altogether.
Sounds fun!
Yeah I love it when people say "if you don't pay you are the product" as if paying for youtube premium, google one, reddit premium or spotify will stop them from harvesting your data haha that's how naive we were back when we thought data was collected only for ads.
Yeah their cozy relationship is terrifying considering Edward Snowden's revelations. It's such a simple workaround the constitutional right to privacy. Simply buy data from a willing company. And we wonder why they don't make laws against private companies' data mining... 🤔
Free my ass! Avast charges money for that service. Hell they make you subscribe to use any service outside basic virus scan. So customers paid to have their data stolen and sold.
I dislike this sentiment. Just because something is FOSS or open source, doesn't mean it's not harvesting your data or doing something nefarious.
kinda wrong sentiment to get from the statement. statement is only saying if
if free and NOT open source > data harvest
it doesn't necessarily imply that
if free and open source > doesnt data harvest
at all. its just you have the ability to find out via code of they do or not. thats more or less in the boat of logical paradoxes you can make.
A good example would be Yuzu (the Switch emulator), it was open source and collected so much telemetry that Nintendo might go after their users.
This might be fear tactic but it shows you that you aren't safe
I don't know about Yuzu's data collection but they were destroyed because they existed.
So companies like Proton and BitWarden are harvesting your data with their free tiers?
I haven't looked into Proton, but BitWarden is open source both server side and client side.
Proton is open source as well. Free tiers are supplemented by subscribers. https://proton.me/support/proton-plans#proton-free