So it finally happened. The thing we were saying is questionable practice from the beginning has finally come to a point where it unnecessarily exposed the user.
Some streamer had his IP broadcasted to all the viewers because avast!'s popup displaying his IP jumped into the stream, being visible to everyone on it at that moment. While IP itself is a semi public thing, it’s only public to servers you’re connecting to. Having it public just like that can potentially be abused which is just not cool and being done by a software that was suppose to keep you safer makes it even worse.
The only reason they are there is because Avast is within my system and everything is filtered through it. So it should know my bloody IP, it would be a totally different matter if it was able to do this outside of my system, where it could be more serious and considered hacking.
Avast has a privileged position being installed on my system and this is just abusing that position trying to give me a headache so it can sell me an aspirin. It just gives the user the feeling that Avast is looking over their shoulder at everything I/we do as a sales opportunity.
Years ago Avast didn’t popup scare tactics that I remember with the latest ads, its getting to the point of way over the top in my opinion—From this one your ip address is visible, to the webcam might be spying on you, and hundreds of others that popup occasionally, to Notification of Avast Premium for 6 months or whatever the darn notification is
Avast has had the privilege of being installed since 2006 on household systems, but only a matter of time it will get to a point where it’s way too much, and force even longtime users to possibly give up on using it.
Probably why a lot of other tech forums when i posted on PC issues before in the past, that was probably unrelated to Avast–like my missing Temporary internet files location that I posted about a bit here and another forum, first thing in the reply was, what Antivirus you running, I replied Avast 19.5 at the time, and next reply was to dump Avast, and just use Defender. ((I didn’t dump Avast yet, fixed that issue with a clean windows 10 install in the end))
If it really has to do this, it should just say “your IP is exposed” and not actually show it. Normies don’t know the IP address anyway so it doesn’t matter whether you say the real one, say none or just make something up.
Well, we’ve argued their marketing methods before and nothing has changed. Coz they just don’t care apparently. Changing display of IP to just saying it is exposed would be a start.
Who knows if anything will change at this point, it’s been the same ad for a while now with showing the IP addy at times. Whats it gonna take for them to change the ad to just say Your IP Address is exposed, without showing the actual IP, sure most users probably don’t even know there IP,
But imagine if someones doing a presentation, or on a video call with skype and suddenly that popup comes up showing the IP
I know developers wanna make money by having people purchase parts of Avast, or upgrade to Premium version, but where to draw the line with the annoying popups, bad enough notifications come in for 6 month Premium upgrade or whatever the heck it is, I just dismiss it usually
marketing methods will not change as long as revenue goes up, so the annoying marketing popups will continue
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…our goal is to become the world’s no. 1 security company in terms of revenue,” added Steckler.
Sometimes the popup shows your location. That could be just as dangerous. There’s a lot of weirdos out there.
Or in my case it shows me what it thinks is my location, or IP. To scare me into their VPN service. Well, I’m already behind a VPN. A much more capable one even. With actual proven credibility in court. So none of those ‘threats’ are even remotely correct or problematic. Again; the popups are just dumb.
It can be difficult for a lay person to distinguish between real alerts and these scare tactics. It is a hassle to teach familiy members to ignore these, without them ignoring every legit alert to. So I get calls. Like yesterday when the main screen popped up at boot. Including the white part on the bottom with the ‘privacy issues’. I got called. Had to figure out what was going on. Then I turned on my own PC and got the same screen. Sigh.
This difficulty is of course exactly why Avast does this. Even if just 1% bites, that is a win. However it is precisely this annoying behavior that leads me to advise everybody I know not to encourage it by buying an Avast product. A catch 22. The more pushing, the more I advise against spending money at Avast. Sadly, other free AV clients have also become more and more pushy. So i guess suffering the annoyances is the new normal.
I don’t know about bitdefender but Kaspersky is maybe not an option. The Dutch government is phasing it out over security concerns. So perhaps that should be a red flag for consumers.
AVIRA is just pure garbage. Maybe its detection is good, but everything else from interface to design and how friendly it is to user is just absolutely horrid. Stupid launcher installs bunch of crap and you have to uninstall it one by one with slow uninstallers. Jesus christ, if this is German design and engineering I want whatever they are smoking.
I’ve had the IP address pop-up quite a few times. Interestingly today I had a new Avast pop-up saying my connection isn’t encrypted even though I’m using NordVPN. I understand Avast needs to promote its products but it should at least be accurate with what it’s saying.