a company is NOT going to admit that it is collecting personal info in a covert way!!  so whatever makes anyone think that any answer given by a company rep on the issue would be true is delusional, or just has a blind faith in that company..

as fo Stans complaint, it is a legitimate concern. AV's are for the purpose of protecting your personal data and machines( YES some malware CAN cripple your computer, necessitating a drive replacement or can even corrupt the bios) so if a companies products CONSISTANTLY trip warnings, the companies products are at fault, not the AV.

i personally do not use an 'active' AV on my net rig because of lack of resources, but i do run scans at least once a week with several 'on demand' scanners.

plus i run all executables in a Sandbox environment, and scan all zips before installing to the same Sandbox , before installing to a runtime or archiving the files.

fyi, as an aside, the CMS 'pings' ALL outbound ports BEFORE it looks at the internal ports it needs to run