AVG’s Updated Privacy Policy Lets Them Sell Your Data [Updated]

Update – As pointed out by our reader, this only applies to those who are running the free version of the AVG Anti-Virus software.

Remember when Spotify announced new privacy policies a while ago that seemed to suggest that it would be extremely invasive, and where they might need access to certain aspects of your mobile device even if it made no sense? Many weren’t particularly thrilled by it, and now it looks like AVG could be next to feel the brunt of the internet.

The company has recently published an updated privacy policy which according to many, has been interpreted to mean that if you agree to use their services, that they have the right to sell any data that they might have on you based on your browsing habits. However according to AVG, they claim that the data collected will be non-personal data.

This means that the data collected cannot be used to identify you, so for example if you were to browse Google, AVG might collect information on your browsing history, but might not collect information about your login and so on. According to the policy, it reads:

“We may also aggregate and/or anonymize personal data we collect about you. For instance, although we would consider your precise location to be personal data if stored separately, if we combined the locations of our users into a data set that could only tell us how many users were located in a particular country, we would not consider this aggregated information to be personally identifiable.”

We’re not sure if this will make users feel any better, but safe to say the idea of taking personal information and selling it is not one that many users look kindly upon. It will be interesting to see if AVG might want to backpedal on this or clarify it further.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Computers
Tags: avg, Privacy