Around 2003/04 was installing Avast/AVG on my friends desktops/PCs was a wonderful freeware. I started working as a system administrator around 2007 when I did the same on a few office machines, I had noticed how they became rogue, By infecting healthy machines with malware and prompting to buy paid version for removal, I am not sure if anyone remembers this thing with Avast ?
I worked at an ad network company for years (we basically put crappy add-ons on poeple's machines that generate search revenue). All of these AV companies basically extort money from crapware companies. if you pay them, you can get unblocked.
At this point Avast is way worse than the malware it claims to protect you from. I've been running Windows for years now with just Microsoft's built-in malware protection and it's fine.
Friendly reminder that free editions of Avast collect and sell[1] user clickstream data to one of Avast's companies, Jumpshot[2][3]. This "panel" includes 100m "online shoppers" and 20m app users, in total registering 5 billion clicks every day.<p>[1] <a href="https://martechtoday.com/jumpshot-makes-public-some-amazon-purchasing-data-other-digital-consumer-insights-to-marketers-223352" rel="nofollow">https://martechtoday.com/jumpshot-makes-public-some-amazon-p...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.jumpshot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.jumpshot.com/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://press.avast.com/avast-software-acquires-jumpshot-to-work-magic-against-slow-pc-performance" rel="nofollow">https://press.avast.com/avast-software-acquires-jumpshot-to-...</a>
Maybe just my point-of-view. But Czech-Slovak companies have strong influence in antivirus software. With avast.com / avg.com / eset.com<p>...or does every country in world have their own AV software (local)giants? I'am curious...
Back in the day when 3rd party antivirus on windows was a must, these guys were the best price-performance trade-off. Then windows added defender as a standard that was as good, with the added benefit of a shared best interest of making windows run well; at the same time avast et al. moved to scummy practices and FUD. Good riddance.
AV is almost a cargo cult nowadays. Born for windows, now as a de facto must have for corporate IT. Everyone use it. Either no IT bothers to question why is it needed, or management hold beliefs from the 90s that AV is useful
There isn't a big difference between most AV and malware nowadays.<p>Both hog all your system resources, both send info about you to HQ, both spread often piggybacking on other software, both are hard-to-impossible to remove.