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FTC bans antivirus giant Avast from selling its users' browsing data to advertisers
(techcrunch.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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Privacy
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If there's anyone out there still using Windows or who otherwise needs an antivirus, just use ClamAV. It's free and open-source, does a pretty good job of finding viruses, can be run as a daemon, and is extensible.
Want a different index? Fangfrisch. Want a GUI? ClamTk. Using Windows? ClamWin.
I honestly find it so strange that it took me around eight years to discover that this was a thing. I was forced to use McAfee, Norton, Kaspersky, BitDefender, and all of the worst AV software on the market before I eventually switched to Linux.
I disagree about ClamAV in-so-far as its vanilla virus signature database. You really should use some third party ones though you have to be careful since some like specifically malware patrol are way too general. For example, malware patrol will identify any document mentioning any drive.google.com URL a virus.
In regards to MP, I actually submitted the offending signature to MP support and the CSR told said and I quote "Unfortunately that is not a false positive, there is confirmed malware hosted at drive.google.com." It caught my attention because a bunch of READMEs from some github projects and some HTML files ended up in the quarantine. I asked if future signatures would include this general URL since I'm going to blacklist this specific signature and was told basically 'yes, probably'.
I do recommend third parties though and most are free for personal use. Some require a key and therefore some sort of sign up but it isn't terrible except perhaps in regards to where I'm posting, some would consider it so.
Kaspersky is the worst?
Ah, now Kaspersky itself isn't a bad AV. However, given how much data AV software has the capacity to collect and where Kaspersky is based, I don't trust it. In that scenario, I may as well switch to Yandex and start using Mail•ru instead of Proton.
Yandex left Russia too now lol
And the holding company is Dutch
Whoa, really‽
I am also weary of the data that they can collect especially after logging in but there are versions of the app and licenses where you can mitigate this by turning off certain data collection and not logging in.
As far as the Russian thing is concerned, I don't have much to provide other than what I read. Some of that is they have already moved the processing and storage of foreign data to Switzerland.
"American or Russian email provider?"
"Swiss."
German is also good, but I personally feel that Proton provides a better experience than Tutanota or Posteo.