Add recommendations against third party AVs

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1

I see many people thinking qdding an AV to windows and android will help their privacy. It could be worth it to add this to the misconceptions and warn people against using this. People still seem to fall for the blue eyes of these companies.

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2

Good idea. Would probably be good to put some news articles of AVs being exploited and that Norton crypto miner.

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3

Are there truly no good AVs left? I think I have a few in mind and they also work in the enterprise space.

I also use Virus Total these days to check for potentially shady files but I am also aware that uploading to Virus Total have absolutely no privacy because they will also submit the same files to their listed AV vendor partners that will check for their respective signatures. Also IIRC that paid VirusTotal clients, pretty much the general public, also have access to said files.

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Regardless of how good they are they are all quite useless. Why would you add another party on high system privileges when the OS itself has an AV build-in that nowadays works really well.

Besides that this adds a party who can (and does) collect data it also weakens security because of the way that these programs need to run with their high privileges.

VirusTotal is indeed for scanning individual files not an AV replacement.

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5

Agree, Keeping device up-to date will protect against most if not all type of exploits.
All major OSes have option to enable separate security updates that are independent of features updates releases. Security updates are small and may not require a reboot. So, there aren’t any valid reason to turn off automatic security updates.

Maybe this should be mentioned in each separate OS guides. (also advise against jail breaking/rooting that also undermines the security)

There are also been a rising use of cleaning software which claims to increase security & performance. I also don’t think this is necessary as most of them require high system privileges that may delete necessary files by mistake.

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As you said unrelated, so please open a different thread