Avast SafeZone browser can access Firefox Yahoo and Facebook sessions?
It appears that Avast SafeZone browser has access to Firefox data in some way. When I am logged into Yahoo in Firefox and open a SafeZone tab to Yahoo, SafeZone can bring up my email without having to log in first. IE and Safari do not do this but rather show the signin page as they should. This also happened with Facebook but after I logged off Facebook in Firefox and tried to open Facebook in SafeZone, the signin page appeared so I can't reproduce the Facebook issue. Signing into Facebook with Firefox again does not give access to SafeZone.
SafeZone should not be using another browser's data or sessions but Firefox should keep its data safe and private as well. Do I have some things set wrong or is this a real problem.
All Replies (4)
Avast SafeZone is based on Chrome (or Chromium, a subset of Chrome) so it definitely shouldn't share your Firefox cookies. Could it be that SafeZone saved your Yahoo cookies from a previous session, independent of your Firefox session?
Anything is possible, but I don't think so because I didn't use SafeZone to sign into Yahoo. Nor did I use it to sign into Facebook. Both were signed into using Firefox only. I just started up SafeZone to see what it was and, since their start screen had a Facebook icon on it, I clicked it. Then the Yahoo icon. And now I just tried Amazon and it shows me logged into my Amazon account. Something is definitely wrong here.
I'm still logged into Yahoo on Firefox and I logged out of Yahoo on SafeZone. When I bring up Yahoo Finance on SafeZone it has my recent stock quotes from Yahoo, without even signing in. When I try to access email I'm asked to signin to one of my accounts that have only been used in Firefox, my default browser. I also access another Yahoo account via IE but that is not shown by Yahoo in SafeZone. It looks to me that SafeZone is accessing Firefox cookies at the very least.
Hi codeBuster, could I suggest asking on the Avast forums? I this investigating this feature requires a paid version of Avast and I don't know that any support volunteers use one.
I've asked there as well and no response yet. There is a problem somewhere and I suspect unprotected Firefox data is part of the problem. The reason I posted here was to see if there is a way to keep Firefox data - cookies, local storage, history, etc. - hidden from other browsers/programs that are not supposed to have access to it.
How SafeZone accesses Firefox data and makes use of it I don't know. I also suspect something wrong on the server side as well that prevents detection of traffic coming from different browsers on the same IP address. Whatever happened to session tokens and such.
If the Firefox data is not secured and any program can access it then it's easy to see someone with bad intentions doing bad things like sending bogus emails, corrupting local storage, planting erroneous history to taboo sites, etc.
Thank you for your help. Happy Holidays!