Could anyone suggest clean anti-virus software taking end-users' side?

I am currently using Windows 10 without 3rd party antivirus simply because popular antivirus nowadays is becoming less and less trustworthy with all these commercial co-protection and telemetry business going on. Nobody would want an antivirus which basically can scan your entire system and upload information even remotely related to 'technical' to improve their profit of product.

Another issue is many of the known antivirus identify and kill more 'deep tools' (which ultimately benefit end users) far more than any ad-ware, spyware or melicious behaviour software. This is far concerning. Internet these days has far complicated security built-up that you do not have to miskill a good file like in those old days.

Cutting out the long story, I am hoping to ask anyone out there may have very good knowledge and advice to help me to find a very different brand of antivirus or solution, a more pure skilled software which protects user systems and stand by the user's side, not to play a business game. I am sure not all antivirus that bad but I do not know any antivirus which only just kill the viruses and if possible extensively fending off the intrusive application threats nowadays in many 'ordinary' apps, no background dodgy operations, no telemetry, no suspicious and relentless connections to an official server, no forced-autoupdate, and performance friendly.

It may sound too many words to ask but it is really be basics a decent user would concern about their machine. I thank anyone in advance.

CyberLock™ - The User-Friendly Toggling Computer Lock.

Callender said:

Ditto on that but i fear that only advanced users will be able to make the best use of it. On the other hand if you are just browsing and checking email and maybe installing the odd program then it works great without too much configuration. I reckon that you'd still need some sort of javascript blocking in your browser like Bitdefender TrafficLight addon. Of else disable WSH and enable on a per use basis when needed.

Also a user would usually require the Pro version.

I used it for a couple of years around 2014 - 2016 but don't use it currently. Here's my post on it from back then. It's likely evolved a lot since then.

VoodooShield free blocks exploits and more - Windows 7 Forums

Its changed a lot since you used it, for one , there is no free version anymore. There are a lot of settings which may intimidate some users but for the most part you really don't have to touch 90% of them ( I don't). Dan says he made this so anyone can use it and I think most users could figure it out fairly easily if they put a bit of time into it.

Malneb said:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/legal/privacy-policy

Its also not in a companies interest to tarnish its reputation so when they are trying to make money they are going to be cautious of what they do on the backend. If it ever got out that computers are now compromised from running insert AV solution software 3000 here, then that company could crash over night.

Malwarebyets is a good one its got a good track record and if you ask them about something like this on their forum they will tell you in a transparent manner probably.

Many thanks for the detail. I can see your point. Theoretically, it should be like that where companies take precautions handling user data. But in reality, I doubt its feasibility as companies are just human individuals no different from a casual person you met on a street, with limited capability to maintain a simple everyday task. It is a whole different level of investment and risk management to protect users' privacy and frankly, most can't do anything even close to the legitimate ideal so why trust so firmly?

Luckily, no big impact would raise class action to cause any company to collapse and nobody would care if Mr or Mrs caught up by a virus filtering watching obscene content at 3 am in the morning, as part of the ‘technical data’ a junior technician uses to improve their customer experience. It is becoming a society of nobody cares ‘about you’ or if anybody do care, you get ‘beautiful’ censorship.

You see where this is going in reality. It is actually paramount for software being simple. Simple things never mean simplistic.

I heard about Melwarebytes for a while and you certainly made it a very interesting option or even worth investment. I like the idea of lifetime license. You buy what you own. You don’t rent software, at least you don’t have to. I never used Melwarebytes but the privacy policy is rather generic, mixing terms of collecting user data from software utility and their online services or websites. They aren't helping. I hope in their software, there is at least an option to just turn off their in-app telemetry and its related processes which consume hardware.

It's sad to see those mixing up businesses in a programme. I miss the old days when you got an antivirus, it was just an antivirus of two parts – engine and definition database. You may update your definitions regularly while engine is more difficult to innovate but nothing mandatory (I’m not talking about Avira). Also, the point I am hoping to ask is to replace Windows 10 default antivirus Defender which is hugely intrusive and performance wasting on itself.

Anyway, thanks again for sharing your experience.

- - - Updated - - -

Digmor Crusher said:

CyberLock™ - The User-Friendly Toggling Computer Lock.

I'll take a look at this. It says of a different technique on virus detection which can be user-friendly. Thanks for the suggestion!