Registration of avast! 4 Home Edition

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Why is your Address a requirement of registration?

I really enjoy using avast! 4 Home Edition and I am very appreciative that Alwil provides this software at no cost. However, I completely disagree with the Address requirement of the registration. I personally believe that free software has every right to ask for your Name and E-mail for registration as some free software does. But I cannot understand why Alwil requires Addresses and what Alwil does with a database full of Addresses. I think that it should be removed from the registration completely.

Thanks,
Dave

2

You can leave empty (i think) or just enter city name where you live without exact address.

3

E-mail, Name, Address, ZIP, City/Town, and Country are all mandatory. The only thing that is not mandatory is Phone.

Obviously anybody could input false information into any of those fields, but that is besides the point.

4

What’s the matter on filling that? You will have to trust your security company.
I’m absolutely sure that they don’t share any of that information.
Oh, I received a post card from them but I think it was because I’ve sent one first with my address, zip, city, town 8)

5

Thank you RejZoR and Technical for your prompt replies on this.

However, what I really want to know is why exactly Alwil needs addresses and what Alwil does with these addresses. There must be a reason behind it. Otherwise, it should be voluntary and only the e-mail address and name should be mandatory.

Could anybody from Alwil please answer this question?

Please keep in mind that I do not mean any disrespect by asking this, I just would like a simple explanation as to why it is necessary.

6

I think it is more to do with gaging the spread of the user base than anything suspicious. Alwil haven’t tried to contact me in the year that I have had avast, so it doesn’t appear to be used for any form of marketing.

Much of the Team are currently in the USA so it may be a little time before they see this.

7

DavidR pretty much guessed it, we are asking for the address info simply for the purpose of maintaining statistics data. It’s quite interesting to watch the geographical distribution and its trends in time (e.g. which countries are currently most growing etc).

Please note that the data is NEVER passed to a third party, and is NOT used for any kind of marketing (be it electronic, phone snailmail or other) except for keeping you updated of some avast- or computer-virus-related info that we think you might find interesting.

For more info, please refer to this page: http://www.avast.com/eng/privacy_statement.html

Thanks
Vlk