McAfee Web Advisor What is it, and do I need it?

Thank you @DaveM121 for your clear, concise and unambiguous advice. I personally am skeptical of so-called "free" pre-loaded software. I was unaware of McAfee even being present on my new Lenovo Yoga ... until a pop up appeared "McAfee WebAdvisor added to MS Edge!" and the extension would

• read & change all your data on all websites (!)
• manage your downloads
• communicate with cooperating native applications

Too much authority for me to hand over to an application that hitherto had been secretly lurking I'm afraid - no matter its apparent reputation!

Then a bit of browsing revealed complaints of

• relentless pop ups pushing to purchase other McAfee products
• repeated changing of default browser to Yahoo (is it still a thing?!!!)
• being unable to close McAfee WebAdvisor pop ups that occupy the center of the screen, not even via Task Manager, which advises "Access denied"
• interference with other reputable already installed anti-virus applications, e.g. BitDefender
• exaggerated threat reports e.g. 5 times the number of threats detected than Defender and other reputable AV apps

I have

1. selected "Remove extension" on the aforementioned Edge pop up
2. uninstalled McAfee via the Windows 11 uninstall function which concluded with a system tray confirmation that uninstallation of "McAfee Premium _ Individual" would be completed upon restarting my PC

I believe covert installation of such a powerful piece of software, with deep access to our PERSONAL computers, no doubt paid for by McAfee 3rd party associates, is at least unethical and quite possibly illegal, especially when it acts as a Trojan horse to peddle their other products, using pressure and fear mongering tactics.

Stay well and safe everyone!

I uninstalled anything to do with McAfee but still had the pop-ups in the end I found if you right-click on them it gives some options, not sure what they were now, but one was to stop them, and I never had a pop-up since.

hey Dave

I am Harsh

i just want to know that it is secure or not because i heard some peoples are saying that this is not good just delete it . what should i do now because its giving me warning that 5 malwares detected in your laptop

please help Dave thank you

I'm having the same problem with the warnings and pop ups. I installed the free download of Malwarebytes that scans for viruses. It found no viruses. So I think Mc Cafee is trying to scare us into buying their services. I'm going to delete Mc Afee from my computer right now and hopefully it will be gone. Whatever you do DON"T click on the pop up. I tried that and hundreds of pop ups appeared. I had to quickly unplug my computer.