McAfee uses web beacons that can be used to track and serve advertising to users (Windows)

HelpNet Security ^ | Mar 17, 2916 | Zeljka Zorz

[dayglored]

A test of seven OEM laptops running Windows has shown consistent privacy and security issues, including an interesting revelation that the McAfee Antivirus running on six of them is using web beacons to serve ads and possibly even track users online.

The seven laptops – Lenovo Flex 3, Lenovo G50-80 (UK version), HP Envy, HP Stream x360 (Microsoft Signature Edition), HP Stream (UK version), Acer Aspire F15 (UK version), and Dell Inspiron 14 (Canada version) – have been tested by the security research team of Duo Security by simply sniffing the traffic sent from and to them once they have been taken out of the box, plugged in, and connected to a network.

“The focus of our research was on home systems accessing multiple networks, including public Wi-Fi and the corporate environment. However, this research also impacts corporate enterprises looking to improve both security and privacy settings for Windows 8.1 and Windows 10,” they explained.

“Within the first few packets on all seven laptops, there were issues. It took awhile to figure them out, as much of the traffic was encrypted and one had to go by server hostname or calling program name, or by reverse-engineering the calling code to find out what was going on,” they pointed out.

...

Unfortunately, changing privacy settings is not as straightforward as one would hope. In some cases, the user would have to disable a service or create/adjust registry keys – and that’s not something that most users know how to do.

After Patch Tuesday updates, many of the privacy settings are reset to their default settings, and the user doesn’t get notified of this.

[dayglored]

Looks reasonable to me.

[Swordmaker]

To quote dayglored for his Windows Ping List, "YIKES!" McAfee's uses Web Beacons to track users and serve advertising to users, apparently mostly Windows users, but there's nothing to stop them from doing the same to Apple Mac users. . . and of course, there are a lot of Mac users who run Windows virtualized in a sandbox. — PING!

McAfee A/V for Apple?
Ping!

The latest Apple/Mac/iOS Pings can be found by searching Keyword "ApplePingList" on FreeRepublic's Search.

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me