Avast browser extension "spied" on users?

We warned you at the beginning of the year that many of your browser extensions are spying on you, tracking what you are visiting, and even inserting ads into pages. These aren’t just no-name developers either: even Avast, one of the most trusted antivirus vendors was in on the game.

Before we go even one step further, it’s important to note that they recently disabled the spying “shopping” feature in their browser extension. So if you are running the latest Chrome with extensions updated, you are fine. For now.

So Avast has stopped integrating the spying extension, but this is about the principle: you should be able to trust your antivirus provider. Why are they adding a feature that spies on your browsing, inserts ads… and all without properly notifying you?

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Question to Melih: Does PrivDog or any other of the default extensions for Comodo Dragon do the same (or similar) thing? Does PrivDog or any other of the default extensions send back the URLs visited to Comodo or any other entity that is affiliated with Comodo (e.g AdTrustMedia)? If so what other data is also sent (Unique ID, time stamp, IP address etc)?

Sorry to learn that Avast had installed that SafePrice component of their Online Security extension without properly informing the user and making it optional. Though as the article has pointed out that some people might actually want that component to be installed.

For the past few years I have been using Avast ( in its most basic form ), that is without any additional features/addons.