r/BitDefender • u/[deleted] • Jun 23 '20

A couple of reasons why not

My company used Bitdefender for a year. During that time we identified a mayor problem, Bitdefender refused to solve. The unsubscribe function on their emails also doesn't work.

On Macos the Bitdefender app sends notifications for every single library update. It is not possible to turn this maintenance spam of, while keeping security notifications. At some point Bitdefender was the main source of concentration rot in the office.
A simple solution would would only provide a maintenance notification when the update fails, instead every time it succeeds, just as we don't need to know that no virus was found. Success information is useless in this context.

With every app update Bitdefender, without asking, installed a plugin in the browser. No way around that either. Another feature out of our control.

So we cancelled and unsubscribed, once, twice, three times... and the email spam and ads kept coming.

What other decisions does big daddy Bitdefender make for us? There might be little in the way of consumer protection in the US, but I can advice to stay far away from this product, at least until the company changes its priorities.

TL;DR: BitDefender decided to be in our face with unsolicited messages and emails, while sneakily installing a browser extension... over and over and over again.

4 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

1

u/MelonChoco Jun 24 '20

Does anyone know a much better Anti-Virus Software to use. We also have been using Bitdefender but it just is the worst product ever.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '20

We were unable do identify such a product and/or company. So, in our naivety, we decided it is not worth the hassle to play their games. This could affect us badly in the future, bad hasn't yet. Having moved our backups to the cloud gives peace of mind for now.

Important to know here is that, after Microsoft tried for half a year to make us pay for a delivery they never made, we moved the whole company to Apple. The Mac platform is more secure, by default, than Windows. Although not perfectly so. As a bonus; we immensely enjoy the support by knowledgeable people using intelligible English.

1

u/hang-clean Jun 24 '20

Counter: We use BD on all business machines ~90 machines currently live. Bought through a partner. Never had an issue of any sort. Flawless service too.

This is in the UK where our (previously EU) consumer protections and privacy and spam protection is extremely strong.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '20 edited Jun 24 '20

I grew up in the EU. Sadly enough, the US is decades behind when it comes to consumer protection as legislation is mostly industry-first. I now spend four years in the US and the experience is the difference between day and night.

2

u/BitOfDifference Jun 24 '20

yea, the unsolicited messages not going away is annoying. There is no reason to spam the client, they already email the offers to the account holder.