I’ve been using Avast for years, but tonight I was searching on spam telephone numbers in Chrome browser using Google search engine, and about 30 seconds into the searching an Avast pop up in the lower right hand side of the screen popped up. I didn’t take a screen shot, and I just got a glance before closing, but think it was trying to sell some kind of spam protection. It dawned on me that Avast is collecting information and is trying to sell me what it thinks I need.
So, is Avast collecting information on everything I’m doing online now?
I have unchecked “participate in the Avast Community” and “Participate in data sharing”… However, I don’t know if these are related to the issue I experienced.
Leave avast! Community enabled, otherwise you’ll be missing out protection. You can uncheck second option without any harm. The way how avast! does that is it detects locally what you’re doing with browser and suggests a missing component that could enhance protection in those sorts of cases. It’s not a remote monitoring, it’s basically a set of local rules that trigger those popups. Although it gives users impression they are being spied on and quite frankly I don’t know why avast! team does it this way. It’s not helpful, it just scares people.