At the end of the day, any company that faces such severe allegations has lost our faith and cannot receive our seal of approval.
The SafetyDetectives team has carefully considered our decision to scrub Avast from our website over the next several weeks. Three months later, Avast shut down a subsidiary company, Jumpshot, in the wake of investigative reports documenting the sale of personal data from around 100 million users, all gained through improper user surveillance. The Avast Online Security browser extension was deleted from Mozilla, Chrome, and Opera marketplaces in December 2019 after claims that it was gathering a suspicious amount of user data - not only every website visited, but also user location, search history, age, gender, social media identities, and even personal shipping information. Why? Because Avast - which also owns AVG - has been caught in a firestorm of controversy over the last several months regarding serious allegations of unethical business practices. Well, after a lot of consideration and back and forth between departments, we’ve decided to finally remove them from all of our lists.
Our readers have been messaging us and asking why we’re still ranking Avast and AVG on our website, despite them being caught up in a serious scandal.
