OK, let me give you some answers. Please see below.
- What exact personal information does Avast collect , if you have Avast Free installed on your computer ?
Registration of Avast Free AV: name, email address
Product itself: your IP address, your Avast ID.
- If it collects personal information , to what third party's does it send too ?
Currently, I'm not aware of any.
The data from the registration will not be shared with any third party.
The data sent by the product may be shared in the future (if there was strong enough reason to do so) but only in aggregated form.
- Why is the privacy section in the EULA not listed in the privacy policy ? if i click the privacy policy on Avast.com i see other information then in the privacy section in the EULA.
Do you mean the privacy policy link down on
www.avast.com? Well, that page talks about data collected from the website. Of course, the product itself has a different privacy policy, and that's in the EULA which is part of the product (located in C:\Program Files\AVAST Software\Avast\License).
- And what exactly do they mean with this '' The collected information may be transferred to third parties or to other countries that may have less protective data protection laws than the country or region in which you are situated '' , what third party's do they mean ? , and what country's do they mean , i live in The Netherlands and my information goes to Czech Republic i assume , any other country's my information goes too ?
Third parties: see above.
Countries: Avast itself (as a company) currently has 5 locations (Czech Republic, USA, Germany, Austria and a parent company in the Netherlands). There may be other locations/offices opened during the lifetime of the product/EULA.
Currently, the personal data from the registrations are stored exclusively on our servers in Prague (i.e. inside the EU) - although they may be routed through our US servers.
- If i do not participate in the community of Avast , ( unchecking the box ) if i install Avast , do i still get 100% protection from Avast , including the cloud features ?
Pretty much. There might be some tiny little things now and then, but in general, the protection level should stay the same.
- And i do want to help Avast in a way , only not by giving personal information , i dont mind to send anonymous information to Avast to make their detection ratio etc better , if i uncheck the box , what information does still get sended to Avast ?
Community membership isn't really about any personal data. The only thing that may be considered personal are the two things mentioned above -- your IP address and the installation ID of your avast (which allows us to track your history, measure the number of active installations etc).
- And if i uncheck the box , does WebRep still collect information on what sites i visit , and what i type in search engines ?
WebRep is a cloud-only feature. As such, it has no other way than to send this information to our servers - to get a rating info about a domain, you obviously have to send the domain name to the server.
BTW WebRep doesn't send full URLs, just domains.
- If i do not install WebRep , am i still protected against exploits ? , if i do not install WebRep , which protection feature falls ?
If you don't install the WebRep / browser plugins, besides the WebRep ratings, you will also lose the phishing site protection. There's some additional functionality planned for the plugins in the next program update as well.
I do not want to make Avast look bad or something , i just want exact information , straight forward , not in a cryptic way , just tell me a exact , straight forward answer please.
That's fine, no worries. I don't think we have anything to hide here... we're not in the business of stealing your personal data and selling it on the black market, really...
Cheers
Vlk