Did you know that Californians are obsessed with Selfie Sticks from Amazon.com? Or that people in Maine buy lots of coconut oil?

Thanks to Jumpshot, a marketing analytics company, you can find this information – as well as more useful information – by using the tools available at Jumpshot.com.

What may be most interesting to you is that Jumpshot is using Avast data to drive these unique insights. We provide Jumpshot with anonymized and aggregated data that we collect from scanning the 150 billion URLs our users visit each month. Using Jumpshot’s patent-pending algorithm, all of the personally identifiable information is removed from the data before it leaves Avast servers. Nothing can be used to identify or target individuals. Avast COO Ondřej Vlček explains the data stripping algorithm in an Avast forum topic.

Jumpshot infographic showing Amazon.com shopping cart values by state. Anonymized and aggregated Avast browser data was used to create this information. Click here to see the full infographic.

Data security, of course, is very important to us. We go to great lengths to keep our users safe, and have never shared any data that can be used to identify them. We never have and never will.

We are aware that some users don’t want any data – no matter how generic and depersonalized it is – to be used in market analysis. This is why we clearly state during the installation of our products what information we collect and what we do with it, and offer our users the ability to opt out from having that data collected. We believe we are unique in our industry in offering an opt-out, but we do so because we respect that choice to be our users to make, not ours. We’re grateful that more than 100 million of our users, when given a clear choice, have chosen not to opt out, and we thank you.

The foundation of our business is trust, and trust only exists with honesty.

We have always strived to have an honest relationship with our users, and we will continue to do so. Currently we do not make any money from this relationship but it is an experiment as to whether we can fund our security products indirectly instead of nagging our users to upgrade. As most people are aware, most all products we use every day—Chrome, Facebook, Firefox, WhatsApp, Gmail, etc.—are indirectly funded by advertisements. In most cases though, the products directly examine what users are doing and provide them targeted advertisements. Although we suspect some security companies are doing this, we do not believe it is the proper approach. Instead, we think that this anonymized, aggregated approach is much better to maintain the trust relationship that we think is so important between us and you, our loyal users.

As always, thank you for your support and patronage. Together we continue to make the Internet a safer place for all of us.