If you are wondering how those companies can offer a free anti-virus, AVG has stepped up and told us – they sell our data. In fact, they even produced this short video about it.
The main point of this video: anonymized information about your Internet activity will be sold to third parties.
Twitter lit up about it. As you can well imagine, people aren’t happy. I can understand how people can think it’s outlandish for a security company to do something like sell user data. Search for @AVGfree on Twitter and you’ll see what I mean.
Although this method of monetizing a free product shouldn’t be shocking; Google, Facebook, Gmail, and most mobile apps all use this method for making money on their free products. The main difference here is that AVG openly told us what they do. I’m not suggesting run away from AVG as fast as you can; I’m sure the other free anti-virus products all do similar. However, if you insist on using something else, here is a great resource to check into: