On October 28, Palant published a blog post detailing these findings. Palant concluded that the collecting of data was not an oversight. All that is connected to a number of attributes allowing Avast to recognize you reliably, even a unique user identifier,” Palant said. Tracking tab and window identifiers as well as your actions allows Avast to create a nearly precise reconstruction of your browsing behavior: how many tabs do you have open, what websites do you visit and when, how much time do you spend reading/watching the contents, what do you click there and when do you switch to another tab. “The data collected here goes far beyond merely exposing the sites that you visit and your search history. This data includes the full address of the page, the page title, the referer URL, a unique user identifier (UID), your OS version, your country code, browser name and its exact version number, whether you previously visited the page, and other information.
Wladimir Palant, the creator of the AdBlock Plus ad-blocking extension, found that the Avast Online Security and AVG Online Security extensions were collecting much more data than they are intended to, including detailed user browsing history. While these extensions certainly appear helpful, they were caught snooping on user’s browsing habits in October this year.
