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Comment by AStonesThrow | Hacker News Reader

Is there any anti-malware suite on the market that is not collecting and sending back telemetry to its master?

I give admin-level access to this stuff (or Windows/Play has it already) and it has an all-access pass to all activity, including reading my screen and every web page.

So the only difference between that and "spyware" is semantics, connotation, and trust.

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ClamAV is open source

That was not the premise, and I see no relation between license and telemetry.

That being said, I used to run ClamAV, and as I understood it, it was far from a complete security suite, only a scanner, and had no reason to communicate with anything.

Also, it never gave me anything but false positives, flagging image files (jpg, png) on my Linux system with obsolete/benign win32 malware. I wasn't running win32. Idiots.

clamav is used as a network based scanner. It's not unreasonable for it to flag windows malware on a Linux host.

Indeed, that's the idea, such as protecting the users of an MTA/POP3 host. That's not what I was running, and ClamAV cannot replace Windows Defender, McAfee or Norton, no matter how freakin' free its source is. Honestly.

I don't run antivirus on my desktop but you're probably right. They don't have the resources to be an all around antivirus solution. Their engine does have value beyond antivirus though. For example I am using it with non-virus signatures to block various malicious email types.

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