Avast Software (LSE: AVST) has announced that it is shutting down subsidiary Jumpshot after the company faced backlash for the subsidiary's practice of selling user browsing data.

Avast has faced stiff criticism after a joint investigation by Vice Motherboard and PC Mag revealed that the company's Jumpshot subsidiary was selling user data to numerous major corporations. The report, created using leaked documents, exposed Avast as using its popular antivirus software to collect browsing data on its users, where Jumpshot would then sell the collected data to other companies. Some of the companies named in the report include Pepsi (PEP  ), Microsoft (MSFT  ), and Google (GOOGL  ), among many others. According to Motherboard and PC Mag, the data used was supposedly from users who had opted into Avast's data-sharing program but were unaware that their data was being sold.

The data used by Avast included search engine browsing data, website traffic, and even specific data related to websites such as YouTube, where specific search terms and videos watched were recorded. According to the recovered data, even users' pornographic searches were recorded by Avast. The data recovered contains no personal data, but it is entirely possible to determine the identity of specific users based on the data that was captured by Avast.

In the aftermath of the expose, Avast has announced that it is shuttering Jumpshot. In an open letter, Avast CEO Ondrej Vlcek stated that the company decided to "terminate the Jumpshot data collection and wind down Jumpshot's operations, with immediate effect." The termination of Jumpshot's data provision services is immediate, though the timeline for the actual termination of the Jumpshot subsidiary is currently unknown.

The details surrounding the data harvesting effort are troubling to many as it raises questions about the transparency of such operations, and whether or not users are adequately informed enough and if they were properly informed enough to give consent. Until last year, Avast required users to opt-out of sharing data with the company, which means that many users may not have been aware that their data was being used. It was not until recently that a prompt was added during installation that allowed users to opt-in or out of sharing data, and it mentioned that it "may share" data.