Would you trust this company? Symantec / Norton: • Longstanding consumer complaints about aggressive upselling, scare-style scan warnings, auto-renewal, and

Would you trust this company? 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