The worrest antivirus i have ever seen...
I wanted to be protected. What I got was a subscription I couldn’t escape, a computer that crawled, and a company that treated “customer service” as a maze. The renewal trap. The first-year price is bait. The advertised deal is dirt cheap, then the renewal hits at several times the price, often with an auto-renew charge you barely remember agreeing to. Countless users online describe the same story: a surprise charge, a rushed phone call, and a “special retention offer” that’s still more than they expected to pay. Cancelling is a part-time job. Signing up takes two clicks. Cancelling means hunting through account menus, chat bots, hold music, and agents who keep pitching you discounts while you repeat the word “cancel.” Refunds are a gamble, and many people say they only got one after disputing the charge with their bank. The software slows you down. For a program meant to protect your computer, it sure acts like it’s the one mining your resources. Users report sluggish startups, laggy browsers, and background scans that hijack the machine at the worst moment. Some people say removing the software fully took special removal tools, because a normal uninstall leaves pieces behind. The crypto scandal. In 2022, Norton shipped a feature called Norton Crypto inside Norton 360 that could mine Ethereum on customers’ computers, with the company taking a 15% cut. Many users felt it was installed without their clear consent, and critics pointed out that a security product using your electricity and hardware for profit is a bizarre betrayal of trust. The LifeLock baggage. Identity protection is supposed to be the gold standard of trust, yet LifeLock was hit with FTC actions in 2010 and again in 2015, including a $100 million settlement over alleged deceptive advertising and failure to keep its protection promises. Customers have also complained that the monitoring alerts are mostly noise and that when something real happens, you’re largely on your own. Upsells everywhere. Norton 360 bundles a VPN, “dark web monitoring,” cloud backup, and other extras you may not need, then pushes upgrades and add-ons through constant pop-ups. The more you pay, the more it feels like you’re buying a menu rather than protection. Verdict. Modern operating systems already include solid free protection, and there are cleaner, cheaper, less pushy alternatives. Paying a premium for a product that’s heavy, aggressive about upselling, and hard to leave is not security. It’s a subscription with an antivirus attached. Would I recommend it? No.