Jumpshot Shuts down amid Controversy over Selling User Data

Avast announced that it would be winding down Jumpshot, its $180 million marketing technology subsidiary that had been in the business of collecting data from across the web, including within walled gardens, analysing it, and then selling it on to third-party customers that included tech giants like Microsoft and Google and big brands like Pepsi and Home Depot.

A few days ago we saw how Jumpshot was collecting the data, the problem was that even though it was an optin, users were not aware that their data was being collected and sold. Rand Fishkin has published a post (I strongly suggest reading this) on why shutting down Jumpshot is a bad move if you support more competition on the web. He does bring up some valid points, tl;dr of which is below:

Jumpshot provided invaluable data like this; data that the US Congress used to hold Google’s feet to the fire about their anti-competitive practices.

The Jumpshot database aggregated and anonymized all the URLs visited by all the devices that opted into Avast’s data-sharing request. Avast asked for consent at signup with a super-clear opt-in screen. Not only that, they followed up with an email opt-in! And an easy, one-click opt-out for anyone who didn’t want their anonymized data shared.

Let’s be real. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple — none of these companies’ data practices are nearly as transparent, as clear, as easy to turn on and off. As numerous publications have noted, when you “shut off” tracking or opt-ins by Facebook and Google (in particular), they still track and profit off your data in a dozens of ways. Any criticism of Avast that doesn’t include 100X more antagonism, calls for boycotting, and support for laws against Facebook, Google, Amazon, and others cannot be taken seriously. If you’re tweeting today about how Jumpshot/Avast violated user privacy somehow (IMO, they don’t), you better be railing every day against what Facebook, Google, and Amazon are doing.

Rand’s greatest fear is that this weaponization of “privacy rights” as a contentious issue will shut down more and more aggregators and providers of information that let small, medium, and large competitors to the big tech monopolies compete against them. It will shut down the abilities of the press, of the government, of big tech critics like him to call those firms out on their misleading, incomplete, or false claims. And ultimately, it will lead to more power and wealth concentrated in the hands of the few vs. the democratization of data we all should support.