> However, the issue here is one of trust. Should you trust Avast with this kind of access to your private information? Avast has essentially chosen to hijack y

> However, the issue here is one of trust. Should you trust Avast with this kind of access to your private information? Avast has essentially chosen to hijack your web browser’s security without your permission, inserting itself as a silent watcher into all your secure communications. If you've installed a program with administrative privileges, it already has total, unrestricted access to your machine. There may be a reason to be concerned about this, but it's not that they're getting some access that the user has not already granted by installing the software. I'm not a fan of blacklist-based security like AV, I think it's basically useless. But if the filtering features of Avast are something you want for some reason, this seems a legitimate way to do it. The alternative is to read this data directly from browsers memory (they can do this with the access they already have), which is likely to break at every update and require a huge amount of programming effort.