Avast provided us with the following statement: Update: The extensions are available again. When you try to open one of the Store URLs of Avast or AVG extensions you get a "Oops! We can't find that page" error message. It appears that Mozilla removed these extensions from its Store. Neither Avast Online Security or SafePrice, nor AVG Online Security or SafePrice, are returned by the Store currently even though these extensions exist. Palant calls for Google to also investigate the Avast and AVG extensions, as a similar behavior also exists in their Chrome versions.If you search for Avast or AVG on the official Mozilla Add-ons website, you may notice that no results by these companies are returned. The developer says Mozilla is still talking with Avast over its extensions, so there’s a good chance that the links will go back online in the coming days after the said concerns are resolved. Without an official statement, it’s believed that Mozilla took the extensions down in order to give Avast and AVG more time to comply with its privacy policy and update the add-ons to address the data collection. Palast says this helps Avast “create a nearly precise reconstruction of your browsing behavior,” as the company can then generate a bunch of statistics, like the number of active tabs, visited websites, time spent on each page, and clicks. In his thorough analysis of Avast’s extensions, Palant explains that they collect browsing history information that includes visited sites, search history, and even tab and window identifiers. While both Mozilla and Avast/AVG have remained completely tight-lipped on the extension removal from the add-on store, it’s believed this decision is related to recent information revealed by Wladimir Palant, the creator of AdBlock Plus, one of the most popular ad blockers for Firefox and Google Chrome.
At this point, these extensions are still running on devices where they’ve been installed previously. Mozilla’s links to Avast Online Security and Avast SafePrice, as well as their versions wearing AVG’s badge, have been removed from the Firefox browser add-on store and can no longer be installed by users.īut as per GHacks, this isn’t a full ban, as an extension that is blacklisted by Mozilla is also removed from the existing Firefox installations. Extensions developed by Avast, as well as their AVG-branded versions, have been removed by Mozilla and can no longer be found in the Firefox add-on store, albeit for the time being, it looks like a full ban is yet to be instated.
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