AOL releases free antivirus but violates privacy

Claiming antivirus is something too important to ask customers to pay for (good one!), AOL released a new product, based on Kasperski engine (award-winning and certified by ICSA Labs), for free: Active Virus Shield.

Only other 3 antivirus are available today for free on Windows: AntiVir Personal, the open source ClamWin and Grisoft AVG.

On February Virus.gr published a massive comparison of 50 antivirus programs, including Kasperski and these free tools. Kasperski was at first position.

The engine sports commercial-class features including:

• 2 hours vaccine delivery time


• on-demand and scheduled scanning


• real-time protection


• POP/SMTP/IMAP email accounts and newsgroups scanning


• ZIP/ARJ/CAB/RAR/LHA archive files scanning


• scheduled updates


• priority thread execution depending on computer activity

Someone could think: too good to be true.

And in fact AOL asks us something in exchange: not just the email address needed to download the package but also a lot more of personal informations, including credit card use and general behaviour schemes.
Put in a simpler term AOL is providing a free antivirus and want to profile us back. Definitively less elegantly than how Google does.

The not so exposed EULA also leaks the unexpected possibility of sudden injection of advertising in the product:

Information Collection.
Your APS Product information consists of personally identifiable information collected or received about you when you interact with the Software and its related features. Your APS Product information may include registration-related information (such as your e-mail addresses); information about how you use the Software, as well as your responses to offerings and advertisements presented through the Software; transaction-related information (such as credit card or other preferred means of payment, billing or shipping information); customer service information; and technical and diagnostic information gathered or received from the Software. Your APS Product information may be supplemented with additional information, including publicly-available information and information from other companies.

I'm comfortable with the idea of an ad-supported free antivirus, but I think customers have the right to know since beginning if any ad will appear on the program they are downloading.

I'm not so confortable instead with the idea of permitting a company to profile my actions on my computer outside the interaction with its products or services.

Antivirus is something too important to ask customers to pay huh? Too bad after the terrible security breach AOL had with its customers data.


Update: It seems I'm not the only one concerning about the AOL EULA. Obviously.