My GPS Co-ordinates and Postcode being sent to Avast!

[HotChilli]

Hello,

I do not have Avast installed, and a relatively fresh install of Windows and i installed a packet monitor to check CCleaner. Lo and behold the CCUpdate.exe process is sending all my personal information to Avast.

My GPS Co-ordinates, my postcode (Zip code), my town, IP address, my ISP, country and timezone.

Now can Piriform please tell me why my GPS Co-ordinates and personal data are being transmitted to a third party server? I've attached a screenshot of the packet monitor, and for now uninstalled CCleaner and blocked the whole Avast.com domain in my Windows HOSTS file.

 

 

[Guest Stephen CCleaner]

Hi HotChilli,

About the Data

Your IP address is the one assigned to you by your Internet Service Provider. The rough location of your ISP is registered in publicly and privately accessible databases managed by digital mapping agencies. For example, if you enter one of Google's IP addresses, 8.8.8.8, into a website like https://www.iplocation.net/, you will see that most digital mapping agencies pinpoint it to 'Mountain View, California', which is the location of Google's headquarters. However, the complete address of Google's property is not recorded with the IP address.

Similarly, the longitude and latitude data in your example probably do not correlate with your exact physical location. In the example above for the Google IP, one of the results shows the longitude and latitude for that IP address as this location. It is not the exact location of Google HQ.

The non-digital postcode works in a similar fashion. It is indicative of a wide region and used by national and local postal services to ship post around in batches. A postcode is a fraction of an individual's address and is not unique to you or your property.

 

Why the Data is Collected

The data is collected for the legitimate business purposes of providing an emergency update service to ensure our users are protected. The location data is used to see where our users are so we can be sure if all our users need an update at the same time, our servers can cope with the load. We can also monitor if updates fail, where the communication is breaking down, so we can fix outages across our systems, or investigate with the relevant ISP.

Your IP address is not stored for any longer than it takes to derive the approximate location (e.g. Sydney, Australia). We then make a note of the approximate location with no other associated data.

This method of data collection is compliant with GDPR. The data is collected by Avast.com, who are our parent company. They are not a third-party.

 

Our Privacy Policy

You can read about the data we collect and why in this section of our Privacy Policy. The software provides privacy settings where you can control data collected.