AVG, the Czech antivirus company, has announced a new privacy policy in which it boldly and openly admits it will collect user details and sell them to online advertisers for the purpose of continuing to fund its freemium-based products.
This new privacy policy is slated to come into effect starting October 15, and the company has published a blog post explaining the decision to go this route, along with the full privacy policy's content, so users can read it in advance and decide on their own if they want to use its services or not.
This is what AVG claims it will collect from users for the purpose of selling to interested parties, mainly online advertisers.
"We collect non-personal data to make money from our free offerings so we can keep them free, including:
- Advertising ID associated with your device;
- Browsing and search history, including meta data;
- Internet service provider or mobile network you use to connect to our products; and
- Information regarding other applications you may have on your device and how they are used."
Because "free" is only "free" for users
AVG has mentioned that it will not sell personal data like name, emails, addresses, or credit card details, but that these might sometimes leak inside the browsing history.
When this happens, the company claims it will take precautionary measures to filter out personal details from the browsing history before selling it.
AVG also adds that personal, identifiable information like addresses, age, or IPs, even if not sold, may sometimes be shared with collaborators.
This seems to be a provision put in place to allow user data to be used for statistical and research purposes, and the company has stated that data will never be bundled together, only aggregated. This means that only emails would be put together in the same batch, never attached to any name, username, or other personal data.
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