Avast Anti-Virus Software Collected and Sold Customer Information

[honestone33]

Just saw this earlier:

Antivirus Maker Avast Sold Data on Millions of Users - TidBITS

Motherboard and PCMag have teamed up to expose antivirus maker Avast’s practice of collecting and selling data on millions of users.

tidbits.com

Not good. Note that near the end of the article, a recommendation for Malwarebytes appears. I run it sometimes, but I also have ClamXAV installed on both of my Macs. However, I do not have it running in the background. I typically do a virus scan for both of my Macs once a month, first downloading and running Malwarebytes, then launching and running ClamXAV. Never had an issue.

 

[MandiMac]

Honestly, no one should be surprised. If a product is free, you are the product - it is that simple.
About AV software: Since I went Mac in 2009 I never had any trouble of any sort, no scareware, no adware, nothing. I never even thought about scanning, and I always see ads from AV companies as exactly that: advertisements that try to invoke fear in Mac users.

 

[sprague.rod]

I have not had an issue with malware for a couple of years. I use DetectX malware scanner and removal tool and the free version of MalwareBytes once a month, roughy. Yesterday Safari, which is not my default browser was hijacked by Any Search Manager see: https://macsecurity.net/view/188-remove-anysearchmanager-malware-from-mac
This is just one page of instructions I found which did not work. DetectX Swift did find a couple of files called Mainpage though. I deleted them of course but it was not until I read about browser prefs being greyed out the I checked System Preferences > Profiles. In Catalina there is no such preference panel but searching in the search box for profiles brought up an Unassigned Admin Pref for Mainpage. I deleted that and everything was fixed.
My point is even with AdGuard extension on Safari and the fact that it is only used for trusted sites it still got "infected". The link gives a good explanation of what it is and how it can be transferred but it still took me most of a day to remove it.