Last fall, AdBlock Plus creator Wladimir Palant revealed that Avast was using its popular antivirus software to collect and sell user data. While the effort was eventually shuttered, Avast CEO Ondrej Vlcek first downplayed the scandal, assuring the public the collected data had been “anonymized”—or stripped of any obvious identifiers like names or phone numbers.
“We absolutely do not allow any advertisers or any third party…to get any access through Avast or any data that would allow the third party to target that specific individual,” Vlcek said.
But analysis from students at Harvard University shows that anonymization isn’t the magic bullet companies like to pretend it is.
Read the full article on Vice.