Avast won’t sell data to Jumpshot anymore

Avast will stop selling user data to its subsidiary Jumpshot, the company announced Thursday. 

“As CEO of Avast, I feel personally responsible and I would like to apologize to all concerned,” Ondrej Vlcek wrote in a blog post. “Protecting people is Avast’s top priority and must be embedded in everything we do in our business and in our products. Anything to the contrary is unacceptable.”

He continues, “For these reasons, I – together with our board of directors – have decided to terminate the Jumpshot data collection and wind down Jumpshot’s operations, with immediate effect.”

The decision follows a joint investigation from PCMag and VICE’s Motherboard into the way Avast’s free anti-virus software was harvesting user data and how that supposedly anonymized data could be linked back to specific users. 

The investigation pointed out how data accumulated from the “100 million devices, including PCs and phones” that utilized Avast’s product allowed clients to “view the individual clicks users are making on their browsing sessions, including the time down to the millisecond.” 

That, in turn, would allow clients to combine data from Avast with other data to paint a fuller picture of a user’s digital footprint. For example, Amazon could take the data of an “anonymous” user purchasing something from its site and match it with that exact purchase from its records and identify that user. 

Apologizing for the practice, Vlcek emphasized that Jumpshot was an independent entity, and that it and Avast operated within the law. He then noted that in the process of “re-evaluating every portion of our business … I came to the conclusion that the data collection business is not in line with our privacy priorities as a company in 2020 and beyond.”

He did not say, however, how long it will take for Avast to “wind down” Jumpshot.