As mentioned in the original and repeatedly revised entry on Tracking and Data Theft by Avast, as well as a new test of the Avast One Software, it has been repeatedly criticized that the software products of the company Avast Software s.r.o. collect and appropriate large amounts of data on personal devices (mobile and desktop environments).

This particularly affected the software CCleaner, which was acquired by Piriform Ltd. and integrated into Avast, a company that has already been criticized in relation to data collection practices.

The main beneficiaries of this data influx are Microsoft Corporation and Google LLC as leading tech giants (no surprise there...), as well as other investors and business partners such as McKinsey & Company, Tripadvisor, Yelp, Pepsi, Condé Nast, and The Home Depot.

Apology, and everything is fine?

In light of media coverage of this incident, the then-CEO of Avast, Ondrej Vlcek, published a statement on the company website  . But

1. Is this the first time Avast has faced criticism for similar allegations?
2. Does a company only apologize when such issues are made public?
3. Do problematic practices continue by replacing services or merely hiding them better? Avast has built a reputation for this.
4. Does unauthorized snooping on devices continue, such as with pre-installed Avast software on older Android devices?
5. Do customers pay for a product from a provider to whom they (unknowingly and) provide data for free, only to become victims of this data collection

Unfortunately, Avast products are still widely used and popular in Germany.

Various websites, whether in the IT sector or shareware platforms, continue to actively promote Avast products despite the repeated incidents and concerns about data security.

Subsequent Change to CEO Statement

Avast later altered the content of the statement, removing the CEO's reference and the address itself, as the original link to Avast's blog post


now leads to a dead page.

The original article can still be found via the Wayback Archive  .

As of 2025, the use of Avast products is still definitively discouraged.