I’ve just read an article on cnet.com regarding HP using ReadNotify.net or MailTracking.com to spy on others. I’m curious if Avast for Home is able to scan documents that are tagged to track users? Thank you.
Just think about this for a minute and you will see that the answer to your question is a resounding “No”.
Whenever you go out on the web, whether you are browsing websites or you are displaying this week’s latest email advertising a sale on jeans at The Gap you are advertising your presence on the internet. You are sending out requests for text, for images, for little pieces of code to run on your system. Every one of these requests (for the vast majority of us) has your Internet address attached to it. There is nothing to stop the sites we visit from recording our visit and the vast majority of them do just that. Not just the sites themselves - many governments around the world now want our ISPs (who convey the requests on their network) to record this information and retain it for a long period.
So HP (or anyone else) can craft messages in HTML (the stuff that makes our email more interesting than plain text) that contains links that will simply record the access back on the server or download and run code in the email environment that will send out further http requests containing more information about you. We have trained our firewalls to allow any http requests sent from our mail client. As to avast, this would be like tracking spam sites, the moment one was known they would change the link address added to the messages.
I’m afraid the only approach to a real solution would be to tell your email client to only display plain text and never, ever, open any attachment that could contain executable code.
I should have clarify my question. While the HTML code within the e-mail reveals much information, hence, using pine/elm/mutt, etc. in Unix prevent these execution. However, Word/Excel/PPT/PDF/etc. documents – can avast@home detects the trojan/virus inserted code within these document types, before a user open the file?
As ReadNotify.com specify, their services can insert codes within the above mentioned document types to reveal more information about a user. The user just needs to open the file (.doc/.pdf/etc.).