Popped up out of nowhere again after deleting the icon, doesn’t have an uninstall feature, can’t get fucking rid of it, you actually have to PAY the fucking service even tho it sais “FREE”!!! I’m fucking staying with Windows Defender, atleast they respect your fucking privacy and shit like that

This comment was posted to reddit on Dec 24, 2018 at 7:58 pm and was deleted within 18 hour(s) and 24 minutes.

faulty logic. we agreed that both free and premium versions have the same virus definitions and malware prevention code (it would be stupid to offer a free antivirus that only had 50% protection rate, no one would buy the premium version). if you are not "beta testing" a new version of software, you are NOT a beta tester. easy as that. it doesn't matter if your data is being collected to update virus definitions. even if it is being collected (and that goes on a case by case basis for every anti virus), then that info is going to be used not only to help premium users, but free users as well.
using examples from 2014 isn't valid. hardware as well as software technology has advanced so much that you're basically comparing tech from two different centuries. also, just because it happened with 1 anti virus, doesn't mean it happens on all of them.
winrar has an unlimited trial version for a different reason than you said: a. it encourages free users to buy the premium version to remove the annoying prompts and b. all the money it makes is from licensing its software in the corporate sector. that's it.