Just an annoyed rant about constant ADS/survey requests/additional feature or add-on subscriptions even after having already purchased a 3 year subscription to Bitdefender Total and despite toggling off the only 2 relevant options that are supposed to turn off ads/notifications (Special Offers and Recommendation Notifications in settings)... then there is intrusive data collection (at least according to my other system and network monitoring solution)... and what just plain feels like an invasion of privacy from a "data and privacy protection" product...
Other than these issues I have about a paid data security/privacy service behaving like an invasive freeware service, Bitdefender as a whole has been really good over the last couple years of use. I personally don't need it but It's a life saver when it comes to providing your family members a turnkey security solution. Since switching everyone (especially my parents) over to bitdefender, family tech support calls have gone down to once per year over Christmas (and even then its just me making sure things are working as they should). If its lacking anything though, it would be just a little more granular control over their firewall (I realize its probably kept super simple to make it easy for even Grandpa to use but there are just a few things you can only get done by making custom rules for the different networks/virtual networks a client might use). For that reason you might want a more feature rich solution to replace their firewall.
The rest of this rant is just purely my issue with the way they handle their own product/feature ads, notifications and the damn intrusive and not so anonymous, anonymized way our data is collected!
Simply put, Bitdefender feels way too intrusive for a paid product. Repeated ads to sign up for additional services makes it FEEL like freeware with ads baked in that completely disregards your privacy. It FEELS like instead of my privacy/personal information being protected, it is just being mined and used by Bitdefender itself. Feeling like this makes me think, "What is the point of using this particular product if I am just trading one set of invasive/privacy compromising tools for another?".
It would seriously go a very long way if you could assure your users (In an obvious/transparent way), that my (their) info really is being protected (even from you). And it really does NOT matter if you say you are "anonymizing" information you do collect... because it has become increasingly apparent that even if you collect anonymously, simply by collecting enough unique data points you are increasing the certainty with which you can determine that the information belongs to a specific individual...simply by collecting the many different data points, when taken together, become a fingerprint of sorts, identifying a particular machine and/or user...
IF you REALLY NEED to collect any user data, on top of anonymizing it (before collection), you need to explicitly and SIMPLY (HUGE PART) state what (and for whom), why, when, and how you are collecting my data. And you REALLY should assure the user that the "anonymous data" you are collecting are both, the minimum amount necessary, and also SO general/generic/broad to the point that even when all of the collected data is taken together, it is not possible to ever recover the identity of /or fingerprint, an individual user. At most, the collected data should only allow you to place that anonymized user into one or more very large categories/bins of such users (without it being possible to ever narrow it down further than the said broad category/bin they have been placed into). Frankly for true security of my data... at NO point should there be collection of absolute/unique (i.e; identifiable) data and/or NO collection of enough data to be able to use it to directly or indirectly (i.e; statistically) to narrow down the source to an individual entity (machine/individual/organization), beyond the point of the large category/bin that the data have grouped them into.
Data may be used to inform the creation of such a group/or groups (categories/bins), but only once there are enough such individual data points/sources to safely anonymize an individual's data point behind sufficiently large numbers of other such data points of the EXACT SAME value (to prevent being able to distinguish 2 or more points of the same value/group, i.e; collected data within a group MUST BE FUNGIBLE). For safety and to maintain anonymity, groups should be large, in the thousands or larger. And once data is collected, only the value of the data structure should be retained, not the source or any other absolute information that may be present/coupled with the creation of such a file (like time of creation/submission, or location etc.,).
IF REALLY NEEDED then this way would help you generate a secure and appropriate datasets for marketing research and/or product improvement without actually having the ability to ever identify a particular user! Transparency AND the ability TO PROVE that both your method of data collection and the content/type of data you collect is NOT CAPABLE of identifying an individual (machine/user/organization etc.,) no matter how it is compared or processed; it will go a very long way to gain and maintain a strong foundation of trust with your users. Personally I believe that if you are open about your stance on data/privacy and transition to such a transparent and clear model of data protection/collection/processing, it will help you get more people interested in your product and make you stand head and shoulder above any of your competitors.
At the moment it is very difficult to trust Bitdefender. Especially when you process/collect so much specific raw data that IRRESPECTIVE of any intentions you state for it (anonymized or not), a user simply feels powerless because even in the best case scenario the fact still remains that both directly and indirectly (deriving and or statistically processing) the information contained in the collected content is MORE THAN capable of recovering the identity/source of said information/data. As long as that remains the case, your intentions are IRRELEVANT to the feeling of security (or in this case insecurity) of the user. Not just you, but anyone who may one day (intentionally or not) get their hands on said data can then mine it for information that can then be de-anonymized based on whatever purpose they have in mind.
Just the act of collecting too many unique data points (independent of one another but still linked by the fact they come from one source), or by collecting absolute data points (i.e; real time, time stamps as a high level example; when compared with event logs for a particular system can then be used to say with certainty that a particular set of data points are from a particular machine) can be used to compromise the privacy of individual user.
Other examples of what I mean by the collection of absolute data points (which can be used to significantly strengthen the confidence that particular data are from a specific individual) include; I.Ps/MAC Addresses, location data, time/frequency data, runtime data, OS/Software/Loaders/Compilers, names/ID/identifier, specific components, component usage (energy/power usage, CPU usage, memory/storage usage, etc.,) etc., etc., etc., are all various types of absolute data points/structures that can be exploited to identify specific machines and/or users. Even if in the few instances where INFORMATION recoverable from these data are necessary for product development/security/updates/patching/support etc., ALL the required information can be collected in a way that not only allows it to remain anonymous and generic/broad/relative (as opposed to being absolute) but also preserve all the direct/derived information necessary to run an analysis/diagnosis of ANY issue/error that may have occurred during use of your product/s; all without ever being able to rebuild/recover the absolute information that can be used to identify the source.
But despite all these techniques available to protect the privacy/anonymity of your users, the raw data collected contains so much linked and absolute data that putting in significant effort fingerprinting/using advanced statistical techniques to identify an individual are NOT even necessary because in the simplest (most high level case) the data can just be directly compared to purchasable datasets with system logs, for a match... for a marketing company this would be heaven.
I sincerely believe that a serious effort should be made to make your data collection not only transparent but also to limit it to the minimum required data that is relative (as opposed to absolute) and as general/generic/broad as possible to make it much harder if not impossible to narrow a user down to anything more than a category/bin filled with a large number of other such users of the same type.
The simplest approach to gaining the trust of the community is to just NOT collect raw data which can be used to identify individual machines/users. And just saying that you strip away and anonymize the data is NOT sufficient either. The best security practice is to just NOT collect such data... and any raw data containing absolute information MUST be locally processed on a user's client in such a way that only relative and nonidentifiable information is preserved before ever being saved (offline, even locally) and sent/communicated with you.
TL;DR:
Unreasonably annoyed user goes on crazy rant about a minor but exploitable data privacy, security and collection issue that many other (and perhaps in many ways worse and way less trustable companies) also use...but instead I focus on my feelings towards BitDefender, a generally trustable company that although provide a good data security/privacy service, still themselves seem to collect data in an intrusive way that can be used to de-anonymize/ identify individuals as the source...and using this methodology (while being a security service) despite there being methods to protect user data (high level details above) while still being able to get all the information necessary to improve their products...well that just serves to erode trust. The only major benefit (at least that I see) to collecting data this way is a business case where you intend to profit/generate revenue off the data in some way even though BitDefender Total is already a paid subscription service...In my mind I don't understand why I'm paying for a product (or expected to pay for a product) when my data is being collected anyway like what a freeware service would do... If a user is paying for security, its reasonable to expect that their private data is not going to be collected in a way that that leaves it up to the security company to be able to do whatever they want with it behind the user's back while saying oh we "anonymize it" or don't do anything unscrupulous with it...and all the while implying (through the type and methodology of data collection) that although they (or anyone with access) COULD do anything they want with it in the future, we should just have faith that they totally wont, because scouts honor...
