These are banners being injected into legit websites, directing users away from those sites and to other sites.įurther, Avast is security software.
First, these are not just product promotions being displayed to the user. Sometimes, free software is ad-supported, and that’s fine. I understand that it can be a difficult business model to provide free software.
(Which sites, I’m not really sure… Avast simply refers to “participating trusted shops.”) A banner is added to the top of the page informing the user that a better price has been found.ĭespite Avast’s claims of sites “participating,” I have a hard time believing that Amazon would be all that thrilled to see a potential sale being directed away to eBay! And although many users might like to see a cheaper price, most would prefer not to have potentially biased recommendations being made by adware. The advertising rears its ugly head when the user is shopping on certain sites. Nowhere in that document was SafePrice mentioned, so a user who reads license agreements would have no idea that adware was being installed. I also checked the license agreement that the Avast installer required me to agree to. However, nowhere on that page was I given instructions on how to permanently disable it. I did see an Avast page load when I opened Chrome, and this page did mention SafePrice in a list of new changes. However, when I installed Avast on a test system, I did not see precisely what they claimed. When SafePrice is initially installed, you are shown a welcome layer which explains SafePrice’s functions, including how to permanently deactivate it. The new SafePrice option, shown at right in Firefox, is enabled by default.Īvast explains the function of SafePrice on their website. The avast! Online Security extension is installed automatically in both Chrome and Firefox when avast! Free Antivirus for Mac is installed. This extension is available for Chrome and Firefox, but apparently not for Safari as far as I can tell. It would appear that Avast has joined the ranks of adware peddlers, as reader Fred Maxwell brought to my attention yesterday. Sometime around December of last year, a SafePrice option was quietly added to the avast! Online Security browser extension.
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