Quickly uninstall these 40 free antiviruses on Android, they siphon your data

If you use a anti-virus free on your Android device, it’s probably time to uninstall it.

” If it’s free, you’re the product “. The adage has been verified time and time again and unsurprisingly also applies to apps that advertise themselves as free antiviruses on Android.

Your data is tracked

Experts from cyber news analyzed the 40 most downloaded antivirus and smartphone cleaning applications on the Google Play Store, which weigh a total of 918 million cumulative installations.

The result is clear: only two of them do not contain trackers to record user data. The good students are Super Antivirus and Virtual Guard. The number of snitches varies significantly depending on the service, from a handful in the best case to around thirty in the worst scenario, to the credit of Nova Security.

It is also not recommended to install the suite of Fancy applications: Fancy Booster (23), Fancy Security (23), Fancy Battery (20) and Fancy Cleaner (20) are the apps that trace the most user activity and information after Nova Security.

Antiviruses that hide… malware

Worse, some applications boasting of improving the security of our smartphones and promising to rid mobiles of their junk files themselves host links to malicious content, exposing the devices to malware.

They are six in this case, the prize going to Dr. Capsule Antivirus, the only one to host three malicious links within it. GO Security and Virus Hunter have two, AVC Antivirus, Fancy Booster and Phone Junk have one.

13 of the applications analyzed received the lowest possible rating in Cybernews’ security rankings due to “ questionable coding practices “.

Experts say less tech-savvy users are more likely to download an app to automatically do this tedious job of deleting unnecessary files or protecting the system. But these free services have a hidden price since it is their personal data that serves as currency. Data sometimes sold to third parties or handled insecurely due to questionable coding and privacy practices.

Source : cyber news