Thread by @danbarker

Here's a short thread on Avast/Jumpshot.

Jumpshot was a tool that sold data on how people like you and me use the web.

Avast - the antivirus tool - recorded what their users were doing while browsing the web.

They anonymised that, and sold it to marketers via Jumpshot.

Jumpshot were *somewhat* upfront that was where their data was coming from, albeit not as explicitly as they could.

Avast were pretty open about it, though I'd guess if you told the majority of (opted in) Avast users that's what was happening, they'd be surprised.

Vice wrote a (well written) article about all this a few days ago.

Articles like that had popped up a couple of times before, but this one blew up. Lots of people found out for the first time that Avast were 'selling' millions of web users' anonymous browsing data.

Under normal circumstances, Avast would have put out a blog post, explained what they were doing, promised to be even more explicit with users.

In fairness: They should've been more explicit, and anonymised things a *bit* better to lessen the chance of any data deanonymising.

But instead Avast just decided to kill the whole Jumpshot company. It has 228 employees according to LinkedIn.

Using the rule of thumb of mature sales-led SaaS companies like that making at least 150k per employee, that would be at least $35 million (probably more).

Jumpshot are not/were not unique. Hitwise, Comscore, SimilarWeb all do vaguely similar stuff.

Hitwise was owned by Experian and - if you think what Avast were doing wasn't transparent enough (which I'd guess most people working in marketing would, but others may not) - Hitwise could be considered equally opaque.

Here's some info from an old PDF on Experian's website, explaining how Hitwise worked.

Ie: They embedded their tools in ISPs (maybe the ISP you're connected to the web via now), and when you browsed around the web, they sniffed your data & sent it anonymously to their servers.

Here's what their website says they do today to gather their data.

In english, this means that some of the companies who provide browser extensions, antivirus tools, and firewalls sell the data about what their users are doing, and Hitwise buy that data.

They do that for millions of people like you and me, and then they add extra data about us (anonymised), and they sell that data on to Dyson, and BMW, and IKEA, and Disney, and many others.

I'd guess very few of those anonymous users know those companies are buying their data.

I'd also guess most people working in marketing/digital areas would fully expect that kind of thing to be going on, and think of it as fairly legitimate.

Facebook, Google & co have far more data than this, and keep the vast majority to themselves for their own purposes.

In summary:
- What Jumpshot were doing was not unique, and was toward the benign end of these sorts of thing.
- They were a bit more transparent than most in the market too.
- Much of this is basically about the shock of the general public learning about how data is used.

- Avast could have also sold Jumpshot on to another antivirus company, but that would have been giving a competitor an advantage in order to save 228 jobs I suppose.
- I don't understand why Avast were fine with what they were doing, until it hit the mainstream.

- It's not the end of the world, or a big deal in any way really, but sad that 228 people lost jobs they'd invested their lives in because Avast couldn't figure out how to talk transparently about what they were doing, or invest more into anonymising things properly.

- it's sad that it's perceived Facebook, Google etc are mostly fine to gather massive troves of data about all of us *as long as* they keep it for themselves, where those who are a bit more open just shut down. Ironically, if they'd kept more quiet, they'd likely still be around