Avast collected data on location, health concerns, and more.
Avast, the cybersecurity software company, is facing a $16.5 million fine after it was caught storing and selling customer information without their consent. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the fine on Thursday and said that it’s banning Avast from selling user data for advertising purposes.
Remember when Google's Motto was "Don't be Evil" It was supposed to be a jab at Microsoft, but it feels like every year tech companies find news ways to just be fucking evil.
PS. Google kind of fails to live up to that motto too, I don't even know if it's still an official motto.
No, they didn't. Alphabet was created as a parent company in 2015 and uses the similarly vague "Do the right thing" in their code of conduct. Google itself still has "Don't be evil" in their code of conduct, unchanged. Google needed Alphabet to not be Google (or they'd get fined to hell) so having everything identical wouldn't have been a smart idea.
That this easily Google-able myth is so pervasive is a wonderful microcosm about online gullibility and laziness.
Love the vibe and energy against pretense for pretense sakes, but your source makes you seem demented as it literally repeats exactly what they said if you read it.
Read your own article all the way to the bottom ❤️
(Also thank you for citing a fucking Gizmodo article from 2018 instead of the actual Google Code of Conduct which is the top result for "Google Code of Conduct to prove my point about laziness beautifully. Please note, you'll have to read all the way to the end again, sorry. https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/)
Kind of?
They would happily sell your mother heroine and auction off her house. They fail at not being evil like Antarctica fails at being hospitable to palm trees.
I'm all for crapping on large publicly traded companies but lumping Google in with companies that sell your data isn't honest. Google does not and never has sold user data. They sure as hell use your data for their own ad network but they do not sell that data wholesale. Meta and other data brokers sell your data and this Avast company sells your data through a product they claimed stopped tracking. I'm not pro-Google but to compare their business model (which is very transparent about how it handles your data and how it's never sold) to Avast's business model (which is to completely lie to the end user while literally selling everything that user does) is not an honest comparison.