If you search for Avast or AVG companies on the official Mozilla Add-ons website, you may notice that they will not return results. Neither Avast Online Security nor SafePrice, nor AVG Online Security or SafePrice will appear.
Mozilla seems to have removed these extensions from its Store. So when you try to open one of the Avast or AVG Extensions URLs, an error message is displayed “Oops! We can not find the page ".
Extensions are however not included in the black list by Mozilla. Blacklisted extensions are removed from the browsers of users.
Avast and AVG extensions appear to have been removed but not blocked, which means the extensions remain installed and enabled on Firefox currently.
Mozilla added several dozen Firefox extensions to the blacklist on December 2, which collected user data without their consent, but Avast extensions were not included in that list.
What happened;
Wladimir Palant, developer of AdBlock Plus, he published an analysis of Avast extensions in late October 2018 on his personal website. He discovered that the Avast extension transmitted data to Avast, which they provided to the company information from browsing history. The data the extension was sending was not necessary for the extension to function according to Palant.
Avast, on the other hand, states on its privacy policy page that it uses anonymized Clickstream data for “direct marketing between products, for cross-product and third-party trend analyses.
Mozilla appears to be in talks with Avast, according to Wladimir Palant. It is possible that Mozilla will add the extensions to its blacklist or ask Avast to make changes to the extensions before resetting them.
Extensions are still available for Google Chrome until now.
