Stay Away from Avast: It’s Not Secure or Private

VPN
1

I’m using NextDNS for DNS encryption and Avast Premium for antivirus. I noticed that my Mac was sending strange queries—about 4,000 per month—to mobile.de, a German auto dealer I haven’t visited before. I investigated and found that Avast was sending these queries. However, I thought my computer might be infected, so I formatted it. I took a backup, erased all data from the disk, and installed macOS from scratch. First, I installed NextDNS, then Avast, and the mobile.de queries started again. I completely uninstalled Avast, and the queries stopped.

Stay away from Avast. I don’t think they are private and secure.

P.S: I bought Kaspersky. I had to deactivate Avast’s proxy and filtering for NextDNS to work. With Kaspersky, I don’t need to do that. NextDNS and Kaspersky work together without any issues.

2

Read up about Avast Jumpshot settlement with FTC. It’s an old case (the service was killed in 2020), but the fact that Avast even considered it a good idea hints that they’ve been pivoting as an advertising company instead of security.

3

Thank you! I was not aware of this case when I was buying it.