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Security Firms Fined Over Never-Ending Subscriptions
Barence writes "'Security firms Symantec and McAfee have both agreed to pay $375,000 to US authorities after they automatically renewed consumers' subscriptions without their consent.' The two companies were reported to the New York Attorney General after people complained that their credit cards were being charged without their consent. The investigators found that information about the auto-renewals was hidden at the bottom of long web pages or buried in the EULA."
$375,000? That's petty change compared to how much they made out of it.
I get periodic statements for my newspaper and cable/TV/phone subscriptions. Generally speaking those subscriptions are month-to-month. If I don't send a check, the newspaper stops. These folks do offer automatic billing to your credit card, but the ones I have seen are VERY clear about this offer. They don't bury the renewal option in the fine print.
A better example to the anti-virus subscription is a magazine subscription. You know up front that you are signing up for a one year, two year, or some other subscription time period. As that time period nears an end (usually much sooner) you start to receive notices that you should renew. Even if you paid the initial subscription with a credit card, they don't automatically renew with that card.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
<rant>About two years ago, I noticed this after I actually went to their website AND called to cancel prior to renewal. It still renewed, and the "customer service" rep had the balls to tell me that they couldn't refund my money when I called about it. I took that one as far up the food chain as I could - including writing an email to the president or whatever, and got the "immediate" response that they wouldn't auto-renew NEXT time. It took approximately 3 months to get my money back. ONLY because I had documented my cancellation with workers numbers and crap. I figure they owe me about $600 in time. </rant>
It's hard to say. As gets brought up on /. quite frequently, EULAs have never really been tested in court. I personally feel that they should be unenforcable because no one reads them, and they are too complicated for the average person. If they are enforceable, it makes it too easy for entities to slip in one-sided terms.
As a consumer, I would expect that any rebill stuff should be clearly presented to the customer to prevent any confusion, at the time of checkout. It should be in bold, and might include a checkbox to check representing that you understand that this will be rebilled.
I feel that at best, it was underhanded and deceiving, and at worst downright fraudulant.
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I run my own home computer repair company (but don't have enough bandwidth to post my URL here). I give all my customers the free versions of AVG, Avast, or Clamwin, depending on their needs/preferences. Usually throw on Spybot and show them how to use the Immunize feature as well. My advice to them is to never, EVER pay for Antivirus/Antispyware software ever again. It's doesn't prevent infections and they end up just having to pay someone to fix it for them anyway. The free stuff is plenty good enough for notifying them when an infection has occurred. My customers thank me for my honesty, for saving them money, and I get plenty more business than I ever would shelling out subscriptions to crap like this.
There are plenty of free alternatives out there, I personally prefer AVG. Here is an article laying the free options out for you.