Norton is owned by Avast owner which sold data for ads.

Symantec / Norton:

• Longstanding consumer complaints about aggressive upselling, scare-style scan warnings, auto-renewal, and hard-to-cancel billing

• Product often came preinstalled on PCs; many users treated it as unwanted bloatware

• Mixed reputation: lab detection scores often decent; customer-service and billing scores often poor

• 2011–2016 class action (Symantec and Digital River): alleged hidden “download insurance” / extended download service added at checkout; settled for about $60 million

• Canadian class action over alleged defects in an older Norton “decomposer” component (software sold roughly 2010–2016); later settled for tens of millions

• 2013–2022 Columbia University patent case: jury found willful infringement of malware-related patents and awarded $185 million; case later settled

• False Claims Act / GSA contracting: Symantec accused of hiding extra commercial discounts from the U.S. government; 2023 trial findings plus a 2024 Gen Digital payment of $55.1 million to satisfy the judgment LifeLock (bought by Symantec in 2016; later NortonLifeLock / Gen Digital)

• 2010 FTC settlement: about $12 million for deceptive identity-theft advertising

• 2015 FTC action: about $100 million after LifeLock violated the 2010 order (weak security program and more false claims)

• Recurring criticism that protection/reimbursement marketing overstated what the service actually did

• 2022–2023 credential-stuffing attacks on Norton Password Manager / LifeLock logins using reused passwords from other breaches; company said its own systems were not hacked; thousands of accounts had some personal data accessed and hundreds of thousands of logins were targeted

NortonLifeLock / Gen Digital

• 2021–2022 Norton Crypto: Ethereum miner bundled with Norton 360; company said it was opt-in and took a cut; users and researchers criticized it as inappropriate in a security product; later dropped

• Ongoing complaints about subscription renewals, refunds, and support after the Symantec → NortonLifeLock → Gen Digital rebrands

• Privacy/tracking investigations (alleged sharing of site/app data with third-party analytics such as Quantum Metric); not a final court finding

• Separate consumer suits alleging LifeLock failed to alert users or honor “dollar-for-dollar” identity-theft reimbursement promises

Why would anyone use Norton? It's just malware.

Not that I expected any better from Norton tbh, but it's a shame to see a beloved brand from my childhood days fall so far from grace. Norton Utilities for DOS/Win9x used to be the bomb... NCD, NDD, SPEEDISK etc. My last good memory of it was introducing me to Darude Sandstorm. But now... sigh.