While it may not have much of an effect on their free antivirus offerings whose users have become numb to companies abusing their data, it could lead to an exodus of enterprise customers who are concerned about this type of behavior. This announcement may be too late to avoid a serious hit to the company. Both Avast and Jumpshot committed themselves to 100% GDPR compliance.

'During all those years, both Avast and Jumpshot acted fully within legal bounds – and we very much welcomed the introduction of GDPR in the European Union in May 2018, as it was a rigorous legal framework addressing how companies should treat customer data. 'Jumpshot has operated as an independent company from the very beginning, with its own management and board of directors, building their products and services via the data feed coming from the Avast antivirus products,' Vlcek continued. For these reasons, I – together with our board of directors – have decided to terminate the Jumpshot data collection and wind down Jumpshot’s operations, with immediate effect,' Vlcek stated in a message posted to Avast's blog.Īvast also emphasized that Jumpshot was 100% GDPR compliant and operated independently with their own management and board of directors who built their services from the data feed shared by Avast. Anything to the contrary is unacceptable. 'Protecting people is Avast’s top priority and must be embedded in everything we do in our business and in our products. In an open letter by Avast CEO Ondrej Vlcek, the antivirus company apologizes to its users and announced that they will be shutting down the Jumpshot subsidiary. This latest revelation that the security company was also using their antivirus software to track the data of over 400 million users and repackage for sale to other companies is not what many would call good security.

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