For those who don’t know, Avast got caught selling your data despite all of their claims to “privacy.” They now have a “settlement” with the FTC where they pay a token fine and agreed to “strict oversight.” We all know just how well “strict oversight” worked for Boeing. Manufacturing planes under “strict oversight” of the FAA and they still fell out of the sky.
No Settlement Without Medium Security Prison Time for Management is Acceptable
The Federal Trade Commission has finalized an order banning software provider Avast from selling, disclosing, or licensing any web browsing data for advertising purposes to settle charges the company and its subsidiaries sold such information after promising that its products would protect consumers from online tracking. The company also must pay $16.5 million, which is expected to be used to provide redress to consumers.
FTC “settlement”
This was a deliberate criminal act done with malice aforethought. They formed a company specifically to do this. In my mind this is the very definition of wire fraud. They perpetrated a fraud over the Internet claiming to protect your privacy and stop online tracking only to turn right around and sell your information just like Google.
White House and Homeland Need to Ban Sale of Avast
It wasn’t that long ago that the White House banned the sale of Kaspersky in America. Even Germany got on that train. Most people didn’t know just how strong the ties to Russia were with Kaspersky until that made the news. I didn’t know that Avast owned AVG or that it was a Czech Republic company.
Do I have something against the Czech people? Nope. I do have issues with the election interference and the fact there are 14,682 Russian “beneficial owners” of companies in the Czech Republic. Given the Russian hacker groups and the fact Kaspersky got tagged in multiple countries without a major public incident (God only knows about the ones that didn’t make the news) it’s seems like time to ban Avast. The sale of the very information they claimed to protect shows they have zero ethics. I mean, this isn’t a breach of stupidity like Solarwindws, they spun up a company to commit this crime.
Summary
We need someone in the White House or Homeland Security realm to ban the sale of Avast products in America. Short of that we need a class action to block the FTC settlement, demanding upper management go to a medium security prison here in America. Not only do they need to pay a fine of at least $1 per user’s information they sold (estimated to be 100 million users) they need to pay restitution to said users.
The list of FTC Commissioners can be found here. Email address listed for commenting on such things is: electronicfilings@ftc.gov
We really cannot allow these “no prison time” settlements anymore. The government failed us spectacularly with Jamie Dimon’s mortgage fraud that wiped out the economy.
