Facebook Introduces Anti-Virus Marketplace

Yesterday in a post about security, Facebook introduced what it calls a Anti-Virus Marketplace. It reccomends and links users to download from a list of anti-virus software.

The five software that Facebook recommends are McAfee, Microsoft Security Essentials, Norton Anti-Virus, Sophos AV for Macs and finally Trend Micro Internet for PCs and Macs.

A majority of these anti-virus software are free while a couple of them are free on a 6 months trial basis. There are some notable exceptions in this list like Kaspersky, BitDefender and AVG Anti-Virus.

The pessimist in me would probably say Facebook has just found another way to sell more advertisements but fact is personal computers are usually not as well protected as they should be. So if Facebook is recommending free anti-virus to users and giving them a single page to access it, I guess it is beneficial.

Will Facebook start selling software?

Facebook earns a lot of money by showing advertisements and also through online gaming. But this landing page for anti-virus is curiously named Marketplace, which makes be suspect that they might get into selling software in the future.

What are your views on Facebook’s recommended list of anti-virus? Do drop in your comments.