PriceChop, also called Browser Helper Object (BHO), is an add-on, which is created to optimize users’ online shopping experience on websites such as Walmart, eBay, and more. It is, however, categorized as a PUP as it collects personal data and displays multiple third party ads for monetizing purposes.
What Is Price Chop?
As you can guess from the name, Price Chop is a tool that supposedly helps you save money when shopping online. When you visit a particular website, it analyzes your searches and starts displaying pop-up ads with deals on items that correspond with your searches. By clicking on those ads, you are promised to receive great discounts on the items you wish to buy.
Why Is It Considered a PUP?
Despite its great promises and truly useful features, Price Chop acts in a way that makes it a potentially unwanted program. And here’s why:
After it is installed, it monitors your browsing habits, analyzes them, and then starts displaying ads that match your searches. These ads, however, are linked to websites that are potentially unsafe and corrupted. Clicking on them will expose your PC to various threats. That is a clear example of how Price Chop is not malicious by its nature, but it does open backdoors for various malware to enter your system.
In order to be able to display ads that match your search needs, Price Chop will not only monitor your moves online, but it will also collect them along with other personal information of yours (such as IP addresses, computer usage history and preferences, operating systems, email addresses, usernames, etc.). It will then send that information to third party advertising agencies. How would you feel knowing that an add-on that is supposed to save you money, stores your personal data and browsing habits in order to display matching ads and also to share it with third parties?
The way Price Chop enters your computer could also appear disturbing to some users. Yes, you can manually download it from its official website price-chop.info, but it could also enter your system via another free program you download. This method is called “bundling” and is legal because you have an option to deny the bundled download via disallowing the default installation settings and check the “custom” or “advanced” options instead.
Should You Remove Price Chop?
In short, Price Chop may really save you money while shopping online. However, the price, you may have to pay to fix potential troubles, is higher. Price Chop exposes your PC to viruses from the Web, which could cause harm not only to your system, but to your identity as well.
Therefore, removing it is the way to go. You can do so manually, or find a legitimate anti-virus program which could successfully take care of it.