Well the day has finally come. Avast Free has followed its predecessors and crossed the fine line between provding a free service and trying to take over the Earth and I have now uninstalled it for good. I normally wouldn’t bother with going through the process of registering and ranting on a product forum but after the experience I have just had I felt compelled to say something just to vent my frustration.
So I was in the middle of writing a technical paper for a science journal that I had been working on all morning. Avast had been prompting me to upgrade (or buy a premium subscrption) for a few days now and I have been ignoring the messages mainly because I was too busy to take any further action but this turned out to be a big mistake. I went to lunch and came back to find my computer had restarted and was “working on updates”. Luckily I had saved my progress beforehand because when I finally got back into Windows I noticed Avast had decided to update or upgrade itself without my knowledge or permission and had completely taken over my internet connection to the point where Dropbox, Thunderbird, Chrome, Skype and just about every other program I use regularly couldn’t connect to the Internet because they couldn’t establish a secure connection. I noticed Avast had installed something called SafeZone which was locking everything down and preventing me from connecting to my university campus WiFi.
Avast, this is a gross breach of your trust and position and I have uninstalled your product never to return again. As a computer science graduate I have recommended your free antivirus to so many friends and family who trust my recommendation as someone who really knows what they are taling about but you have gone the same way as AVG and Avira and broken the trust of your users by installing unwanted spamware without consent. I’m just glad I saved my work before you forced my computer to restart. Bye.
I am not sure if Avast is able to restart your system or if it does this when it is upgrading, but at least in your case this time it was not Avast that restarted your PC. Let me guess your OS, is it Windows 10? Windows 10 has the bad bad habit to schedule it’s restarts for system wide updates automatically and “intelligently” (well, i believe it’s stupid but…). Avast cannotdisplay the message “Working on updates”, that message can be initiated only by Windows (your OS) itself and no other program. It is displayed by the system service that installs updated to your Windows OS (i believe it was Winlogon displaying it).
Thanks for the reply liubomirwm. Yes I understand what you are saying and it is likely that Windows 10 was to blame for the automatic restart and not Avast. I am just saddened and frustrated that Avast decided to install SafeZone without my permission and that it automatically locked everything down. If I wasn’t so au fait with computers I am sure it would have proved to be an even bigger headache trying to work out how to get back online. I remember when Avira did something similar with their “Avira Browser Safety” tool which monitored ever webpage that the user visited then sent them targeted advertisements. I understand (and reluctantly agree with) the need for users to essentially offer up some of their privacy at the expense of a free licence but when a program installs something so intrusive without my consent then as far as I am concerned it has crossed the line and it is time to look elsewhere. It is a shame because I have really enjoyed Avast and never had any problems with it up until now. Anyway, I appreciate you taking the time out to reply, thank you.
I can’t get it why this is a problem. Avast SafeZone is ok. If you have Avast Online Security installed (you should have it if you have avast anyway) and visit a payment site it would open in a secure protected browser. What’s the problem?
Isn’t Avast coming with the setting to ask before upgrade? That should be the default. If it’s not that the solution is easy, just changing the default. :
Yes it does Pondus but the software began to update itself without permission and now it seems as though Avast is no longer sending serial numbers for the free version of the software.
never had problems like this. @_@, by default avast program update will ask my confirmation and just stay there like a good boi. It will never restart until I told it to.
Not excusing avast behavior, but isn’t the raison d’etre for the automatic update because 4.8 is not supported anymore by avast and has not been since January 2017? Your system can certainly run a more advanced version of avast (or any other a/v) quite easily (or is that mistaken also?) and it is not by choice you want to run 4.8?
In any case, this post was started on 13 July 2016.
the update was with your permission as you can clearly read in the UELA that you agreed to when installing avast.
There is no need for avast to send a license code for the free version anymore as the licensing system has changed.
You simply install avast and click on register and it is done now or you wait till the 30 days are over and it will automatically turn in 365 days.
