Nevertheless, my concern is that your security software is disabling web security for 9 million Chrome users, apparently so that you can hijack search settings and the new tab page. The extension is so badly broken that I'm not sure whether I should be reporting it to you as a vulnerability, or asking the extension abuse team to investigate if it's a PuP.

In a letter to AVG he wrote:Īpologies for my harsh tone, but I'm really not thrilled about this trash being installed for Chrome users. If you add to this that the company announced recently in a privacy policy update that it will collect and sell - non identifiable - user data to third-parties, you end up with a scary product on its own.Ī Google employee filed a bug report on December 15 stating that AVG Web TuneUp was disabling web security for nine million Chrome users. AVG earns when users make searches and click on ads on the custom search engine they have created. The main reason why these changes are made is money, not user security. If you check the Chrome settings after installation and activation of AVG Web TuneUp, you will notice that you cannot modify home page, start parameters or search providers anymore. If that is not bad enough, it is quite difficult to modify changed settings without disabling the extension. Quite a few issues arise from installing the extension, for instance that it changes the startup setting to 'open a specific page' ignoring the users choice (for instance to continue the last session).

Chrome notices the changes and will prompt users offering to restore settings to their previous values if the changes made by the extension were not intended.

Avg web tuneup