Avast Internet Security

Description

The notification that ended my trust in Avast appeared on a Tuesday morning in January 2020. Not a virus alert. Not a firewall warning. A news article.

I was eating breakfast and scrolling through tech headlines when I read that Avast had been collecting detailed browsing data from its users through a subsidiary called Jumpshot and selling it to companies including Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, and McKinsey. Not anonymized data in the way companies usually mean when they say “anonymized” — which already means almost nothing — but granular, timestamped records of every URL visited by millions of Avast users, packaged into datasets that researchers later demonstrated could be de-anonymized with minimal effort.

I had Avast installed on my laptop. I had Avast installed on my mother’s desktop. I had been recommending Avast to people for seven years. I sat there with my coffee going cold and read the article twice to make sure I was not misunderstanding it. I was not misunderstanding it. The antivirus I trusted to protect my privacy had been monetizing it.

I need to separate two things clearly, because Avast the product and Avast the company made very different impressions on me, and pretending they are the same story would be dishonest.

How It Started

I started using Avast Free Antivirus in 2013, on the recommendation of a university IT help desk guy who said it was “the best free option that was not AVG.” At the time, this was a reasonable claim.

Avast’s malware engine was excellent — consistently scoring top marks in independent lab tests from AV-Test, AV-Comparatives, and SE Labs. Installation was simple. The free version included real-time scanning, web protection, email scanning, and a Wi-Fi network inspector that checked your router for known vulnerabilities.

It was more generous than most free antivirus products. Norton’s free tier was basically a trial. Kaspersky’s free version was limited. Avast gave you a legitimate security suite for zero dollars and asked only that you register with an email address once a year to renew the free license. I registered with a throwaway Gmail address and used Avast without paying for three years.

The Detection Engine

The detection engine was and remains genuinely impressive. Avast uses a combination of signature-based detection, behavioral analysis, and a cloud-based threat network called ThreatLabs that processes data from over 400 million endpoints worldwide. When a new piece of malware appears anywhere in the network, every Avast installation gets updated within minutes.

AV-Test has given Avast a perfect 6 out of 6 for protection repeatedly. AV-Comparatives awarded it their Advanced+ rating — the highest — in their 2025 real-world protection test. In controlled testing, Avast catches 99.9 percent of malware samples thrown at it.

These are not marketing numbers. These are independently verified results from labs that have no financial relationship with Avast. The engine works. It works exceptionally well.

Upgrading to Internet Security

I upgraded to Avast Internet Security in 2016 when it was on sale for about $40 for the first year. The paid version added a firewall, ransomware protection, a sandbox for running suspicious files in isolation, a real-site feature that prevented DNS hijacking, and anti-spam filtering for email.

The firewall was the main draw for me. Avast’s firewall operates in smart mode by default, automatically creating rules based on application trust levels, but it also lets you define custom rules if you want granular control.

I set it to interactive mode for a week when I first installed it — meaning it asked me to approve or deny every new network connection — and it was educational in the way Wireshark is educational: you discover how many programs on your computer are reaching out to the internet without your explicit knowledge. Spotify pinging analytics servers. A PDF reader checking for updates every thirty minutes. A font manager connecting to a licensing server in Texas.

I blocked six applications that had no business making network connections and never noticed a difference in functionality. The firewall caught things the default Windows Firewall did not because it understood application behavior, not just port rules.

Ransomware Shield

The ransomware shield created protected folders — Documents, Pictures, Desktop, and any custom folders you designated — and prevented unauthorized applications from modifying files inside them.

If a program you had not explicitly trusted tried to encrypt or delete files in a protected folder, Avast would block it and alert you. I tested this myself with a simulated ransomware tool I downloaded from a security research site. Avast blocked it instantly — not just the ransomware shield, but the real-time scanner caught the executable before it even ran.

The layered protection worked as advertised. Knowing the shield was there felt like having a deadbolt on a door you rarely lock — unnecessary most days, essential the one day it matters.

The Sandbox

The sandbox feature was one I used more than I expected. You could right-click any executable and select “Run in Avast Sandbox,” which launched the program in an isolated environment where it could not modify your actual filesystem.

A free utility from a developer I had never heard of? Sandbox it first. A cracked tool that a colleague swore was safe? Sandbox it, watch what it does, then decide.

The sandbox caught two programs that behaved differently when isolated — one tried to create registry entries that looked like persistence mechanisms, and another attempted to connect to an IP address in Eastern Europe that had nothing to do with the program’s stated function. Both went straight to the recycle bin.

The Jumpshot Disaster

Now. The part that ruined everything.

Avast acquired Jumpshot — originally called DataLogix — and used its browser extensions and the antivirus software itself to collect user browsing data. Every URL. Every search query. Every click. Timestamped, tagged with a device identifier, and sold to third parties as marketing analytics.

Avast claimed the data was “fully de-identified,” which was technically true in the narrowest possible sense — your name was not attached — but academic researchers and journalists demonstrated that combining the Jumpshot data with other publicly available information could re-identify individuals.

If a dataset shows that a specific device ID visited a unique combination of URLs — a personal blog, a small company’s internal page, a niche forum — connecting that device to a real person is often trivial.

The Fallout

The reporting was done primarily by Motherboard and PCMag in January 2020. Avast’s CEO initially defended the practice, then announced the shutdown of Jumpshot a week later after the backlash became unmanageable.

The Czech Office for Personal Data Protection investigated. The FTC investigated. In February 2024, the FTC ordered Avast to pay $16.5 million and banned the company from selling browsing data.

Sixteen and a half million dollars. For a company that reported revenue of over $900 million the year before. The fine was a rounding error. The punishment for selling millions of people’s browsing histories was less than what some companies spend on a Super Bowl ad.

I uninstalled Avast from my laptop the same week the Motherboard article was published. I uninstalled it from my mother’s computer the following weekend. I stopped recommending it to everyone I had previously told to install it, which was a list long enough to make me uncomfortable.

The betrayal was not that a company collected data — every company collects data. The betrayal was the specific irony of a security product doing it. You install antivirus software because you do not trust the internet. You trust the antivirus to be the exception. Avast used that trust as a business model. They were the lock on the door that was also making copies of the key.

The Gen Digital Acquisition

Avast was acquired by NortonLifeLock — now Gen Digital — in 2022 for roughly $8.6 billion. Gen Digital now owns Norton, Avast, AVG, Avira, and LifeLock.

Avast and AVG have used the same malware engine since 2016, which means every positive thing I have said about Avast’s detection rates applies equally to AVG, and vice versa.

The consolidation raises questions about competition in the consumer antivirus market — when four of the biggest names are owned by the same company, the diversity that used to drive innovation is replaced by internal optimization. The remaining independent competitors — Bitdefender, Kaspersky, ESET, Malwarebytes — still provide pressure. But the landscape is narrower than it was five years ago.

Where Avast Stands in 2026

The malware engine is still top-tier. The firewall is still one of the better consumer firewalls available. The ransomware shield, sandbox, and web protection features still work as well as they ever did.

Gen Digital has publicly committed to privacy reforms, and the FTC order theoretically prevents a repeat of the Jumpshot situation. But trust, once broken in the specific way Avast broke it, does not rebuild on corporate promises. It rebuilds on years of behavior, and Gen Digital has not had enough years yet.

Pricing

The pricing sits at roughly $50 per year for a single device or $60-70 for multi-device plans, depending on the current promotion. There is always a current promotion.

The free version still exists and still provides the core malware engine without the firewall, ransomware shield, or sandbox. For pure malware detection, the free version is more than adequate. For the full security suite, you are paying roughly the same as Bitdefender or Norton, both of which have not been caught selling user browsing data.

Final Thoughts

I do not use Avast anymore. I switched to Bitdefender in 2020 and have not looked back.

If someone asked me whether Avast Internet Security is a good antivirus product in purely technical terms, I would say yes. The detection is excellent. The features are comprehensive. The performance impact on modern hardware is minimal.

If the same person then asked me whether they should trust Avast with access to their computer, their network traffic, and their browsing behavior, I would hesitate. And that hesitation — the gap between “does this work” and “should I trust this” — is the space where Avast’s reputation used to live and where Jumpshot burned it to the ground.

The engine is excellent. The company shipped it inside a surveillance tool and called it protection. I cannot unlearn that, and I do not think I should.