{"id":4315,"date":"2015-09-29T23:39:55","date_gmt":"2015-09-30T05:39:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/royceeddington.com\/?p=4315"},"modified":"2015-09-29T23:39:55","modified_gmt":"2015-09-30T05:39:55","slug":"if-youre-using-avg-anti-virus-you-need-to-uninstall-it-asap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/royceeddington.com\/?p=4315","title":{"rendered":"If you&#8217;re using AVG anti-virus, you need to uninstall it ASAP"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>AVG antivirus <strong><em>was<\/em><\/strong> a decent antivirus application for Windows. Decent as in &#8220;there&#8217;s nothing else free that doesn&#8217;t stink quite so bad&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>The application did an OK job of keeping viruses out, but it&#8217;s main strength was the 100% free price tag.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this month, though, AVG announced that if you continue to use their application on your PC, they NOW have the rights to &#8220;sell your search and browser history data to advertisers&#8221; if you&#8217;re using their application.<\/p>\n<p>In very plain English, if you are currently running AVG antivirus on your PC&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>AVG antivirus is ACTIVELY WATCHING WHERE YOU SURF<\/li>\n<li>AVG antivirus is ACTIVELY WATCHING WHAT YOU SEARCH FOR<\/li>\n<li>AVG antivirus is collecting ALL METADATA in your web browsers (cookies, history, etc)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>AVG said it doesn&#8217;t matter what browser you use on your PC. If you&#8217;re still using their product, you automatically agree AVG can take your personal information and sell it to whatever advertisers they can find to do whatever they want with.<\/p>\n<p>AVG said, quite bluntly, they&#8217;re doing this to make money.<\/p>\n<p>Such a nice buncha people. So super nice. I wanna take a nice baseball bat to these nice people&#8217;s heads they&#8217;re so nice.<\/p>\n<p>The other BIG problem is even after you uninstall their antivirus application, AVG has not provided a way to delete the data they already collected on you, and they&#8217;re not providing any way for you to look up what they took from your PC.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a big story on both <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.co.uk\/news\/archive\/2015-09\/17\/avg-privacy-policy-browser-search-data\">Wired<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.smh.com.au\/digital-life\/consumer-security\/avg-antivirus-is-selling-your-web-browsing-history-20150921-gjrchi.html\">SMH<\/a> about this mess.<\/p>\n<p>If you have AVG antivirus on your PC, it&#8217;s time to uninstall it and find a replacement. I currently recommend <a href=\"http:\/\/eset.com\/\">ESET<\/a> for &#8220;premium&#8221; antivirus and the built-in-to-windows Microsoft Defender for &#8220;free&#8221; antivirus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AVG antivirus was a decent antivirus application for Windows. Decent as in &#8220;there&#8217;s nothing else free that doesn&#8217;t stink quite so bad&#8221;. The application did an OK job of keeping viruses out, but it&#8217;s main strength was the 100% free &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/royceeddington.com\/?p=4315\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pfyw-17B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/royceeddington.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/royceeddington.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/royceeddington.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royceeddington.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royceeddington.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4315"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/royceeddington.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4318,"href":"https:\/\/royceeddington.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4315\/revisions\/4318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/royceeddington.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royceeddington.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royceeddington.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}