Slyguy said: It's pretty obvious to me that Avast/AVG are fiends for intelligence/telemetry/datamining. They've given us no indication otherwise and I feel bad for people duped into running their stuff, and a LOT of people run it. Click to expand...

People don't want to pay... they want free, so they install Avast Free. And why is that ? Because Avast Free has been promoted to death on the web for decades because it is free.The average person could care less... as long as it is free.The reality of today's digital world = "If I give you something for free, I'm definitely getting something from you... because I don't do anything for free." Not to mention that people do not own their own, personal data. Sorry. You don't. If people owned their data, then they could interfere with the entire digital system in such as way and to the extent that it would be harmful to that system. And no government in its right mind is going to allow that to happen. Research it. A person has the right to restrict data, but generally the system is given the rights to harvest data at many levels - most notably operational.Data = money.The free-loading has a lot to do with how this evolved over the years. And more importantly the fact that people don't think about the consequences of what they do.