When you get something of value for free, often you are the product. This is also true for antivirus software.

It has been known for several years that Avast Free Antivirus and AVG AntiVirus Free collect your browsing data and share it with third parties. This is true regardless of whether you have installed the Avast and AVG browser extensions or the Secure Browser, and we have made this clear in our product reviews.

Avast and AVG have recently added a more explicit user opt-out to prevent such data collection. If you have trouble with this type of data collection, please see our summary of the best free antivirus software.

This is the result of a joint study by PC Magazine and Vice Motherboard, which examined Avast Software's process for collecting and monetizing aggregated user data and published their findings today (January 27).

The two articles imply that Avast and AVG's collection of browser history is secret. In fact, avast has been quite transparent about collecting this type of data. Avast's then-CEO detailed avast's collection software, Jumpshot, in a 2015 blog post.

This is a screenshot of avast free antivirus collected in mid-2018, which does not explicitly mention browsing data, but does notify users about the data collection.

To learn more about the data collected, including browsing history, users needed to access the privacy policies of Avast and AVG, and to opt out they needed to access their settings.

This convoluted process has been replaced with a better, clearer message that reads.

"If you authorize, we will provide our subsidiary Jumpshot Inc. with a de-identified data set, extracted from your browsing history, for the purpose of enabling Jumpshot to analyze market and business trends and gather other valuable insights." The dialog box states.

We ran the installers for both Avast Free Antivirus and AVG AntiVirus Free and this dialog box appeared during or immediately after installation.

(We had previously unchecked the two lines "Yes, install Avast [or AVG] Secure Browser" and "Make AVG [or Avast] Secure Browser my default browser" that were checked by default in the main installer. were unchecked first. Please do the same).

Vice and PC Mag also found that the collected data could be de-anonymized fairly easily in some cases. They suggested that enough information could be sent to the final recipient of the data to figure out, for example, who purchased a particular item on Amazon at a particular time.

Unfortunately, such data is fairly commonplace, regardless of who collects it. For example, it is neither difficult nor expensive to collect geolocation data from mobile advertising and track individuals. Still, it is another reason to opt out of Avast and AVG's data collection.

In an earlier email responding to Tom's Guide questions, an avast spokesperson said that dialog boxes would first begin appearing to new users in July 2019 and to existing users in February 2020.

We are pleased that avast and AVG are being more transparent about what is happening when installing their free antivirus software. We asked an avast spokesperson if there are other types of user data being collected and passed on to third parties.