Hello, my brother has the webshield enabled (all options) and we were wondering how this works.
Are the websites he visits send to avast? Or anything else?
I myself do not have a macbook so I have never seen this option before or have any idea how this works.
Greetings!
Hello,
Web shield checks the incoming traffic while you are browsing. Most of the "checks" happens locally on your computer by avast scan engine with the locally stored virus definitions. We don't send the visited websites to avast backend.
However there is an extra level of protection for premium user (not available in free av) for situations when the engine is uncertain about the website. Then the engine checks it with avast backend and send the visited URL. The reason is that some of the phishing sites have quite a short lifetime. And the local definitions may haven't been updated yet.
However there are options in Preferences if you want to be 100% sure that you don't share anything with us - just go to Preferences > Privacy and uncheck "Allow usage data to be shared with 3rd parties for analytics" and "Share threat information with Avast to improve your protection".
More about the privacy options -
https://help.avast.com/en/av_mac_free/14/preferences.html#settings_personalprivacy
