Avast’s Breach Guard privacy protection software is designed to provide low cost, automated protection for your personal information online. The software offers a suite of privacy tools that promise to keep you safe from data leaks and identity theft.
Avast Breach Guard comes with an intuitive dashboard and appears easy to use. However, the effectiveness of its privacy protection capabilities is difficult to verify. Avast also has a chequered past when it comes to protecting their users’ data and privacy.
Avast Breach Guard is a privacy-focused software offered by Avast, a Czech-based cybersecurity company. Through its automated data breach scanning tool, Avast Breach Guard promises to protect you from data leaks and remove your data from third-party sites by automating opt-out requests.
This product builds on an extensive suite of cybersecurity software offered by Avast. In addition to finding where your personal information appears online, Avast Breach Guard monitors your web browsers for weak passwords. Keep in mind that when you sign up for the service, you’re only able to use Avast Breach Guard on a single device.
Also, it’s worth noting that Avast themselves were recently the victims of a data breach that resulted in thousands of users’ personal information being leaked.
Avast Breach Guard offers a full suite of privacy protection services. The software allows users to assess their overall privacy vulnerability, identify data brokers that hold their data and coordinate requests for data removal, and assess the security of their online accounts and passwords.
Once you have your Avast Breach Guard account set up, you gain access to Avast’s Privacy Dashboard, which gives you a numerical score on the overall safety of your online accounts and passwords. This score is designed to indicate how vulnerable you are to data leaks across all of your accounts. The higher the score, the safer your data is supposed to be.
By automatically scanning the web, Avast Breach Guard tells users which data brokers have their personal information on file. After finding where your data is stored online, you’re able to use Avast Breach Guard to coordinate opt-out requests.
Through the Privacy Monitor section of the Avast Breach Guard, you can see whether any of your accounts have been subject to a data breach or are vulnerable through the use of weak or reused passwords.
Avast Breach Guard is an automated tool for individuals, which runs on your device as a piece of software. Once Avast activates the software, it scans the internet for your data. When it finds your information online, Avast Breach Guard allows you to automatically send removal requests to third-party sites that hold your data.
Avast Breach Guard claims to monitor the internet for instances of your email address showing up online. After you install Avast Breach Guard, you’re prompted to set up your account and let Avast know which email addresses you want it to monitor. When you do so, Avast will send you an email to verify your address.
The first step in getting Avast’s Breach Guard to start removing your data is to tell Avast your personal information. You can do this through their “removal request” form within the Personal Info Remover section of your account dashboard.
Some people may have reservations about sharing their private information with Avast. In 2019 cybersecurity tools made by Avast, and sister company AVG, were labeled as spyware by Mozilla and removed from the Firefox browser after allegations of data harvesting emerged.
After you give Avast your personal information, you can send data removal requests to sites that have been identified by Avast as data brokers holding your information.
In some instances, your removal requests may fail to send the first time, which means that you’ll need to resend them. If that happens, you can set a reminder to yourself to resend your removal requests at a later time.
Avast doesn’t tell you what sites their Breach Guard product will remove your information from. They promise to help you remove your personal data from “data brokers” but do not go into any specifics about which ones they target. Avast doesn’t tell you how many variations of your name or address they can uncover, either.
Avast Breach Guard doesn’t tell you when your data is successfully removed from a data broker’s website. As such, it’s impossible to say how long it takes Avast to delete your data from people search sites.
This makes it difficult for the user to assess whether or not a removal request has been successful without manually searching for their information on different data broker websites.
Avast Breach Guard offers only one pricing plan, which will set you back $39.99 a year. This cost allows you to use Avast Breach Guard and remove information for one person on one device only.
