McAfee Uses Web Beacons That Can Be Used To Track Users, Serve Advertising

An anonymous reader writes: A test of seven OEM laptops running Windows has shown consistent privacy and security issues, including an interesting revelation that the McAfee Antivirus running on six of them is using web beacons to serve ads and possibly even track users online. The seven laptops – Lenovo Flex 3, Lenovo G50-80 (UK version), HP Envy, HP Stream x360 (Microsoft Signature Edition), HP Stream (UK version), Acer Aspire F15 (UK version), and Dell Inspiron 14 (Canada version) – have been tested by the security research team of Duo Security by simply sniffing the traffic sent from and to them once they have been taken out of the box, plugged in, and connected to a network.

Comments

Seems to be more and more

[Anonymous Coward]

prevalent, these "security" apps, companies, whatever, actually straddling the fence, as it were. Ghostery and ABP are but a couple that serve two masters. At present, the only software I trust is uBlock Origin. In the end, I think people will either have to roll their own or there needs to be a public, open source project whereby transparency is the order of business. The Cold War with ad companies and ad blockers has started, and I, for one, will not allow ads on machines I control, either at home or at work.

What I've been thinking is similar to what some of us did when Flash was still prevalent. I symlinked .adobe and .macromedia to /dev/null and by doing this, I was able to view Flash content without the hassle of LSOs/DOM worry. The website thought it was writing to disk and all was well. I'd like to extrapolate this idea out to ads/tracking cookies/beacons/bad Javascript and simply write this nonsense to /dev/null. I believe this is possible, but my programming skills extend to Bash and Perl scripting only.

Any thoughts?

Captcha: Sorcery

And still people wonder why I always uninstall AV

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

And still my friends and relatives wonder why one of the first things I do when I "clean their computer" is delete crap like McAfee, Norton or whatever other third-party AV suckerware is living on their machines.