You ppl are sort of a bit funny. You shout about privacy, yet you clearly don't understand what a statistical info is or what anonymous means.
It means that avast! is indeed collecting certain data (like every antivirus on market these days!), but if you'd want to look it up you'd just get back a statistical data. A statistical data is the kind of data that is useful to avast! Software to combat future malware, but it doesn't really tell them much about the users from which it was collected.
For example, if i visit some infected webpage and avast! detects something. It will collect the URL on which the malware was detected (it's understandable that they want to know where the malware came from). Yes, the URL you visited was logged. Why do you care? It was infected anyway. avast! team doesn't care either. You could go to it intentionally or unintentionally through some kind of redirection, no one really knows or cares. All they care is origin of the malware so they can check the domain and include it into Network Shield if it's found to be all malicious.
It will also submit the sample to avast! if it's found suspicious. Again, it's not sending everything to them, it's sending just stuff that gets flagged as suspicious. And avast! has never been known to generate hundreds of such warnings so any worry of excessive sending of "everything" to them is out of question. Yes, it will also log the file path, where the malware was detected on the disk. If it was on your desktop, yes, user profile will be logged since it's within the file path. It's the way how Windows work and they can't do anything about it. I haven't been to their lab but from all i care it could censor the usernames on the system level. So if they get a data feed back to their systems from a detection on location C:\Users\RejZoR\Desktop\somemalware.exe it could just as well automatically convert the data into C:\Users\USERPROFILE\Desktop\somemalware.exe. They probably aren't doing it but it's a possibility i guess. With millions of such file paths obtained daily, i seriously doubt anyone has time to look at some silly path names that contain usernames which by itself are just random meaningless strings in the end. I mean what good is it to them if they see your name is i don't know, "John Sullivan" or "John Doe". It's just a name. You make worse privacy breach if you open a public phonebook and just fly through it...
Yes, they also collect the country in which the detection was made.
But on the other hand, every company has to follow good business practices and ethics which always include rigorous privacy policies. avast! wouldn't be used by millions if it wasn't trusted enough don't you think? And they had to work hard for 3 decades to create that trust. Do you think they'll throw all that away just because of some privacy nonsense? I find it very unlikely.
As for all the data collected which we call a statistical data. You can see it here:
http://www.avast.com/factshttp://www.avast.com/mapshttp://www.avast.com/communityiqThis is what's called "statistical data". It's an useful data but does it tell it came from me or you? No, it doesn't.
It's like random ppl asking you various things on the street for the surveys. Is that a serious breach in privacy as well? By the end of the day, they won't even remember how your face looked like and they certainly won't remember your name or what you said after 200 surveyed people. And you expect avast! to conduct some evil conspiracy data collection where they get millions of lines of data for various malware samples daily? They just can't.