Avast SafePrice sends data to our server regarding the products our users are looking for and the URLs they are visiting. While formerly the user had to do research and visit price comparison portals, SafePrice now offers automated help to find the best and trustworthy offerings. SafePrice searches the web and offers its users the best price possible when shopping online from sites we trust, safeguarding users from possible online scams.
You may not realize but collecting URL information for this very purpose is extremely common in the security industry, as this information is essential to providing this kind of service. By scanning URLs in the cloud, Avast is able to detect malicious activity, from viruses and malware, phishing and hacking. That is, in the particular case of URL scanning, we do transfer the URL the user is visiting, together with additional metadata to the Avast cloud, which then does the necessary processing and synchronously returns the answer.
Let me start by saying that Avast’s browser extensions, together with some other modules inside Avast, rely heavily on cloud functionality. Finally, they say that all of this was true up until last week when we made SafePrice a standalone extension (removed it from the main Avast Online Security extension). To demonstrate the problem, they used Fiddler (a free browser monitoring tool) to dissect the requests being generated by SafePrice and found the user ID in some of the requests, concluding that the product is “spying”. That the SafePrice extension (which they first call “adware”) collects all URLs that the user visits, and then sends them to the cloud, together with a user ID.
The article basically says that Avast used the SafePrice browser extension to spy on its users. We requested the opportunity to discuss the author’s findings, but he declined to do so. As these are some pretty serious allegations, I also hope that we will be given some room on their site to defend ourselves. Given that the article contains a number of inaccuracies I feel it is necessary to react. A couple of days ago, published an article about Avast and accused us of spying on our users.
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