FTC to ban Avast from selling browsing data for advertising purposes

The U.S. FTC ordered Avast to pay $16.5M and banned it from selling or licensing users’ browsing data after alleging the company harvested and sold detailed, re-identifiable web activity via Avast/AVG extensions and antivirus through its Jumpshot subsidiary while falsely marketing privacy protections. The order mandates deletion of data shared with Jumpshot (and products derived from it), user notifications, and obtaining consent for future data sales; this follows Mozilla’s removal of related extensions and a Motherboard/PCMag investigation exposing the practices.