I am using Avast Free on a Mac running Big Sur. I also use Google Drive File Stream.
My problem is that Drive File Steam is constantly downloading files - slowing down my computer. I have discovered that the Avast Core File Shield is the problem since turning it off stops the constant downloading.
I have added two exceptions to the Core Shields area:
/Volumes/GoogleDrive/
/Users/[Username]/Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS/
Even with these exclusions in place, turning on the Core File Shield has Drive File Stream doing constant downloads.
we have identified a bug - the code that decides whether to scan specific file can read few bytes of file content before exceptions are applied. This may lead to system processes that we internally exclude from triggering scans actually causing us to read some file content, which in case of Google Stream can lead to downloads of whole files. User exceptions you have tried to add do not help with this as they are also applied too late.
We will fix the system process scenario in Avast 14.7 hotfix which is now being tested and should be released this week, and will rework whole exceptions code on Big Sur in the next release (Avast 14.8 ).
We apologise for the issue and thank once again for the report.