McAfee sued over third-party pop-up pitches Security software maker McAfee is being sued over alleged sneaky tactics in promoting third-party services to consumers buying its anti-virus technology. A lawsuit seeking class-action status and filed by two California women, Melissa Ferrington and Cheryl Schmidt, takes issue with pop-up ads for McAfee partners that appear …
An Idiot who, in the real world, would not be trusted to open a can of beans... that was already open, is let loose on the internet. After buying something they didn't mean to they sue the site, due to an inability to recognise their own incompetence.
Sadly this is no longer a rare occurence.
I agree that there are a lot of morons out there (and I feel like I've had to tech support most of them), however...
I wouldn't expect clicking on a popup to be sufficient to be billed using details I'd given to a different company - And "Try it now" implies a trial. I think even most savvy users would be surprised that they started getting billed.
Actually, isn't there a DPA issue here too - Either McAffee gave over the payment details or processed the payment on behalf of the 3rd party - I'm guessing the latter as the former is seriously dodgy?
Not sure I agree with that, charging a person's credit card simply by clicking on a popup is an incredibly bad idea.
How many times have you been working away, click the mouse button or press enter just when Windows decides to present a popup windows with focus. Usually it that blasted "Windows will restart in 5 minutes" window with the "Restart now" button selected, so when you press return at the same time, voi la, your computer shutsdown.
Now instead of losing work & time, you lose money too. Great idea from McAffee. Not that I'd ever have this problem, McAffee is the 1st thing I remove from new machines.
This kind of crap was the reason I switched away from them and thankfully discovered the much better Avast! I got fed up of the frequent 'toaster' popups trying to get me to subscribe to more of their own services that I didn't need. The only vaguely legitimate product I ever found to be worse for that kind of tactic was RealPlayer. This kind of behaviour earned McAfee (alongside Norton) and RealPlayer 4th and 5th places respectively in PC World's top 20 most annoying tech products poll back in 2007.
I dislike McAfee as much as the next person, but can someone explain to me why on earth this lawsuit is being filed - is it really because the end (l)user didn't read the terms and conditions or the EULA before they clicked and signed-up for this thing?
Americans seem prepared to sue someone because of their own ignorance. It'd be quite funny if it wasn't so sad.
The beef they have with this is that it was a single click purchase which set them up for monthly fees with another company.
The single click was on something that said "Try This" and was for a different product sold by a different company. When the link was clicked, it used the CC details that had been provided to McAffe for a different company to charge for the service, all with a single click.
Not good.
.. is an "online disk defragmentation service". How on earth does that work? Does that mean that you transmit an image of your HD, they defrag it, and send it back to you? Or is the "online" part just there to let them bill you *each* month instead of just once?
McAfee... they invent new ways to degrade trust in their products every month.
The should rename their company into "McAnotherFee"...
First off, Frank, what method would you like to use to pay for my new keyboard? i about fell over laughing at the "McAnotherFee" everyone in the (quiet) room looked at me as if i was nuts or something.
Anyways, i agree that what "McAnotherFee" and their partner in crime company is doing is wrong, but i've got 2 WTF's to direct at the victims and their lawyers:
To the victims:
WTF are you thinking using McAfee products to protect your computer? i thought you wanted to stay safe?
To the lawyers:
WTF are you thinking? seeking class action in this case, in order to seek class, there must be a class to have been harmed, do you really think that many people actually use McAfee? either you're delusional or theres more idiots walking the earth than i thought there was.
My dad has some sort of horrible malware infesting his PC. It slows down the whole thing, generally gets in the way, and basically makes a complete annoyance of itself. Recently, it even started popping up messages demanding payment of $60.
Yeah, it's called McAfee.
The supposed cure is worse than the desease, folks. Much worse.
Hmm.
The likes of McAfee and ARPU would be royally screwed if there was an operating system out there which included "baked in" privilege separation, files marked as executable or non-executable, and a self-optimising file system where attempting to grow a file trapped between two others just automagically and transparently remapped it somewhere else on the disk, thus ensuring that files never became fragmentated in the first place.
RISC OS had files that could be executable, or not. A concept of file "types". It also, from the mid-late '80s had a disc system that would attempt to self-defrag (ADFS E). There were many lovely ideas in RISC OS (hey, Microsoft, how about a unified internationalisation system?) but sadly process separation wasn't one of them. The hairy things you could do with a few lines of BASIC. But at least this was usually intentional. The hairy things the C compiler would create if you were programming with a caffeine deficit. Hehe, made for some interesting debugs!
Oh, I'm sorry, we're supposed to be discussing McAfee. <yawn>
And if the circumstances described in the article happened, then there's absolutely NO WAY that I will ever buy, or even try, a McAfee product.
Has McA really failed to notice all those previous occasions where people have boycotted a company because that company did something incredibly stupid or incompetent, and then instead of promptly fixing it (by an apology, a swift refund and preferably some decent compensation for the inconvenience) dug its heals in to guarantee it would lose more than it would gain.
If your customer service is so bad that your users have to take you to court to get a refund for something that should never have happened in the first place, the company is going to lose far far more than the refund it failed to make.
Sooo you buy an AV product and get advertised for more?
I guess this is targeted advertising?!
Can I have the one that does what it says on the label please?....
Especially if I actually paid for it??
CEO of the decade from the panel with the unprofitable Apple store around the corner.
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