It's scary how much information antivirus software nowadays send home every day. It's often marketed as "cloud-based heuristics" or something similarly nebulous. What it really means is that the antivirus software will send home a sample of anything it's not sure about. It could be a confidential document of yours. It could contain your personal information. Oh, and don't forget that MITMing your TLS connections is now a highly desirable feature. A lot of them have Superfish built right in!
In the past, if you bought an antivirus software, that was it. The antivirus would download new signatures at regular intervals, and not bug you until your subscription expired. Nowadays, every antivirus requires you to be logged in to your account all the time, ostensibly to ensure that your subscription is valid, but also in order to allow anyone with access to the web-based control panel to trigger all kinds of scary actions. Every vendor also tries to upsell at every opportunity, sometimes even after you've paid.
I tried to stick with Microsoft Security Essentials for the longest time, because if I had to open a backdoor to somebody, I might as well trust the company that wrote my OS in the first place. Also, MSE was pretty good when it first came out. But its detections rates have steadily gone down, and a number of people to whom I recommended it have gotten viruses that MSE couldn't catch. I use BitDefender on my Windows boxes now. It's the only antivirus I could find so far (apart from MSE) that doesn't constantly nag me to upgrade, but who knows? I might have just opened a backdoor for the Romanian government or something.
In the past, if you bought an antivirus software, that was it. The antivirus would download new signatures at regular intervals, and not bug you until your subscription expired. Nowadays, every antivirus requires you to be logged in to your account all the time, ostensibly to ensure that your subscription is valid, but also in order to allow anyone with access to the web-based control panel to trigger all kinds of scary actions. Every vendor also tries to upsell at every opportunity, sometimes even after you've paid.
I tried to stick with Microsoft Security Essentials for the longest time, because if I had to open a backdoor to somebody, I might as well trust the company that wrote my OS in the first place. Also, MSE was pretty good when it first came out. But its detections rates have steadily gone down, and a number of people to whom I recommended it have gotten viruses that MSE couldn't catch. I use BitDefender on my Windows boxes now. It's the only antivirus I could find so far (apart from MSE) that doesn't constantly nag me to upgrade, but who knows? I might have just opened a backdoor for the Romanian government or something.