Symantec Sued Over AV Auto-Renewals

big set up i believe specifically mcafee creates all the viruses to keep themselves in business

Good, Trend Micro Pccillin does the same crap. They need to stop doing this crap. Pisses me off.

people still use the overbloated, and AOL of the AV world like Symantec and Mcafee?

Is Avira AntiVir, AVG or Avast not good enough for them because they are free?

For some of the utilities I use I simply get messages reminding me that it is time to renew. The problem is I get too many of the exact same message for the exact same product. It is irritating.

I would never buy any of these products. Seriously the whole anti-virus for profit industry is shady.

I hate auto renewal and think they should be made illegal.

What I hate more than auto renewal though is class action lawsuites. This guy is just in to set up a class action lawsuite so that thousands of people join in and they will each get 30 dollars or so but the lawyer can get up to about 50% of the entire take which could mean millions if enough people file.

Opt In = good for the consumer
Opt Out = good for the business

Guess which one companies will choose if not regulated otherwise? (Unless, of course, customer outrage leads to a decline in profits...)

I think it's disgraceful that they are allowed to STORE the customer's card details without permission. This seems to be peculiarly American idea which greatly increases the chances of the customer's details being ripped of.

In Australia on-line vendors never see the credit card details; they get shunted through to the bank's web site for processing.

Businesses have been doing this for years its called pay to play MMO's. You pay a monthly fee which is automatically charged every month for your convience which it is convient so you dont have to remeber to pay it again. Peoplejust complain because they forgot that they were going to be billed again

I'm a PC Tech at a local computer repair shop and we resell Norton Antivirus. To my knowledge, as long as a Norton Account is setup, they will notify you by email and alerts that the subscription is about to expire. You have the option to renew or just let it expire. The people that have their credit cards charge automatically must have bought the product online through Symantec. This lawsuit can go either way.

Anyone using a paid AV program deserves this, plain and simple.

Strange, I have NEVER had that, they start to ask you like a few weeks before to renew. I have NEVER had it auto renew.

BS, this hasn't happened to me and i use Symantec's products. i think you have to apply for auto renewal for it to happen. Symantec should be required to peal off the auto renew charges off the credit cards of all the people 'afflicted' and discontinue their services on said peoples computers. the $375,000 in 'damages' for charging $30 on a reasonable service is all the evidence you need to tell that she doesn't really care about the problem, just how much she can profit from it.

I also hate auto renew. But can you imagine the lawsuits if the companies, even with notification, stopped?

There is a reason why I always use those one time use credit card numbers (most of major credit card company have this kind of service).. so they have no way to renew anything without my approval.. unless they want to give it to me for free..

lol

wow people still use Norton anti virus?

matter of time before this happened.... I heard people complain about this sooo much!

I got charged by Norton as well without my acknowledgment. I want to be part of this class action law suit.

So what if I purchase Norton's product online. I pay for 1 year subscription and that is it. Who give Norton the right to charge me for the next year?

After I was charged, I went to my Norton account. the website was not helpful at all.

Who uses this resource hogging crap? I dumped my av and firewall years ago. Virii and hacks are ancient history. Malware is the main threat and there are plenty of removal tools and tips for any problem incurred.

An occasional scan by Malwarebytes and any of several free spyware apps is all you need.

I have five kids and they all know how to avoid these things and what not to click on and I only occasionally have to clean up something.

I say trash the AV use windows protection if it makes you feel better but my experience is common sense works better then any norton or Mcafee piece of crap

I love those auto-renewals that require you to "call" in which all they do is lower the price in an attempt for you to stay with them...

A phone rep for Identity guard brought the price down from $15, to $10, to $5.99, to $5....and so on until he goes "one dollar man!"...funny thing is...if the service was legit...why lower the price almost 90%?

@ cekasone: seriously....you sell people that garbage? You should list where you are located so we can get the word out to people to avoid your shop like the plague. Calling yourself a "tech" is an insult to those of us who actually are techs. Norton deserves the classification of "infectious and malignant software" instead of Antivirus. Any self-respecting tech knows that the removal of Norton, or McAfee, or even Kaspersky drastically increases the performance of a PC regardless of the Windows OS installed, and programs like Avast, which are free are much less CPU and memory intensive and do a BETTER job, are where it's at. If you bought Norton, you deserve this, you're throwing your money away by buying it in the first place.

@ a REAL tech: And perhaps you should have a little more respect. Norton may not be the best choice, but it is a good choice for people are not computer-literate. As for kapersky, its the most ruthless AV i've used yet.

My experience with norton is that they will give you a reminder period, and then they will just cease your ability to update the software if you do not renew. In order for them to "auto-renew" you would either have to sign up for the service, or provide them your CC number in some way. I agree with cekasone, this could go either way.

wehn my norton was almost up i did get teh option to shut the auto renewal off in an email , my issue was with what norton AV , does to your comp when you dont renew.. i anceled my noton AV becuase we didn't ahve teh money to renew .. but a couople days prior to my last My system started acting like a turd , games would crash , freeze , slow down like resources were being drained away, then the desktop performance also went down sharply.. so i did some digging , Norton was running an obsesive ammount of back programs that was chewin up most of my free ram , and this was the problem . what is odd Norton never did this before until my subscription was almost out .. ask me it was a last ditch effort by teh software , to convince me i needed it for a stable machine. well happy ending didnt involve resubscribing .. instead i uninstalled norton .. problem solved. but for most consumers who arnt as tech savy as i, might have concluded they had gotten a virus , and needed to update thier norton aka re subsdcribe. I seriously hope courts look into this sort of underhanded software code writing. after this expreince i'm not getting norton again , just on principals.

actually its rather disgusting ,. about the time the whole IE MS debacle , MS was considering making an anti virus that was intergrated into windows but due to the massive stink the IE think stirred up MS canceled those palns for a free intergrated AV .. a case where buisness most certianly hampered tech growth , and to this day we are still stuck lookign for shitty 3rd party AV that chew up system resources and so on . me personally , i'd ahve nothign against MS adding a AV to windows. but i'm sure all tehese dirty crooked AV compnaies would get thier panties ina bunch over it

A family members Norton AV renewed itself like this a couple months ago without warning...she was shocked it did it without any notice. She would have renewed anyways but it is nice to actually do the renewal yourself and select what payment method you plan to use.

Actually they should probably be sued for their "virus/malware" like behavior.

I wanted to remove it from my system because it turned out to be a gross resource hog that got in the way of almost everything else I tried to do with my machine. When my subscription had run out I used the Windows Install/Uninstall to "remove" it from my system since it did not have an "uninstall" option in its menu. Less than a week later my firewall pops up telling me that "Symantec AV" is trying to connect to the internet from my machine.

Complained to Symantec and was directed to use a "special uninstaller" which I did. Another week later and my firewall again tells me about "Symantec AV" trying to connect to the internet. I had to manually track down the offending software and remove it, edit my registry and remove it from the hidden backup area.

That is NOT behavior I expect from a company that wants to be respected. They will never get my business again nor will I recommend them to anyone else.

I am not entirely convinced that they are not the ones writing all this virus code. I do not use antivirus on my home machine, and have no problems.