AVG Updates Privacy Policy, Will Sell Your Non-Identifying Data

Security firm AVG plan to collect your browser history (and a list of any searches you've made while using said browser)—"non-personal data," as the company describes—does leave some users of its free apps a bit skeptical.

According to a new report from Wired, AVG has updated its privacy policy to note that the company fully intends to use this information—data that shouldn't identify you in any way—to make money. Its justification is that it provides security apps for free, and this is one of the few ways it can continue to do so. AVG's updated policy reads:

"We collect non-personal data to make money from our free offerings so we can keep them free, including:

• Advertising ID associated with your device
• Browsing and search history, including meta data
• Internet service provider or mobile network you use to connect to our products
• Information regarding other applications you may have on your device and how they are used."

AVG also notes that it might anonymize and aggregate data that it would otherwise consider to be personally identifying for individual users.

"For instance, although we would consider your precise location to be personal data if stored separately, if we combined the locations of our users into a data set that could only tell us how many users were located in a particular country, we would not consider this aggregated information to be personally identifiable," AVG's privacy policy notes.