Dell Technologies
Information Technology
68
out of 100. Number 55 of 512, counting from the worst.
Where Dell Technologies does well
- Renewals 2 of 20. Few problems found.
- Dell pays the arbitration fees itself and preserves your right to bring individual claims in small claims court.
- Its privacy statement is unusually transparent in spots: it explicitly admits 'selling' and 'sharing' tracking data for advertising (many companies dodge that word), offers a 'Your Privacy Choices' opt-out portal and honors the Global Privacy Control signal, does not knowingly sell or share data of children under 16, publishes California Privacy Rights Reporting Metrics publicly, and gives you a right to appeal if a privacy request is denied.
- The 15% restocking fee applies only to non-defective returns (waived when the return is Dell's error), and the terms explicitly note that state laws may void the liability and warranty limitations.
If you have a dispute with Dell — over the product, the terms, or even Dell's marketing and advertising — you can't sue them in court, join a class action, or get a jury trial.
The fine print
6 clauses and findings from the draft archive, dated 1 October 2026. The plain English comes first; the small print is the company's own words. None of these has been checked yet.
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If you have a dispute with Dell — over the product, the terms, or even Dell's marketing and advertising — you can't sue them in court, join a class action, or get a jury trial. You must go through individual binding arbitration, and there's no opt-out offered anywhere in the terms.
YOU AND DELL AGREE TO RESOLVE ANY DISPUTES BETWEEN US EXCLUSIVELY AND FINALLY BY BINDING ARBITRATION ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS, WHICH MEANS YOU AND DELL WAIVE ANY RIGHT TO LITIGATE DISPUTES IN A COURT OR BEFORE A JURY, OR AS PART OF A CLASS ACTION, A REPRESENTATIVE ACTION, A CONSOLIDATED ACTION OR IN A PRIVATE ATTORNEY GENERAL CAPACITY...
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Dell can take your money and then cancel your order anyway — even after confirming it — for any reason, including their own pricing mistakes. An order confirmation email is not a promise they'll actually sell to you.
Dell may process payment for and ship parts of an order separately. Dell reserves the right at any time, even after we send you a confirmation email, to decline or cancel your order or to limit order quantities for any reason, including errors or suspected fraud.
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Dell admits it sells/shares your tracking and usage data with online advertisers, who are free to combine it with data from other websites for their own purposes. And if you opt out, it doesn't undo data already sold or stop all interest-based ads.
we 'sell' or 'share' certain cookies and tracking data and usage data with online advertising providers for targeted advertising purposes, as defined under California and other applicable laws... These vendors may combine this data across multiple sites to improve analytics for their own purpose and others...
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Dell keeps your personal data for 10 years after you stop being a customer — and longer if they decide they need it for legal or 'other obligations.' That's an unusually long default retention period.
For customer data, we generally retain this data for the duration a customer is active + 10 years. Please note that additional retention periods may apply should the data concerned be required to be retained to satisfy our legal or other obligations (such as a pending claim, litigation, law enforcement investigation, government audit or other situation requiring records to be preserved).
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By giving Dell your phone number, you agree they can call or text you with auto-dialed or prerecorded calls — and you're consenting not just for yourself but for anyone else who uses that number.
You expressly consent, on behalf of yourself and other users of your phone number, to such monitoring or recording. By providing us with a phone number (including mobile) as your contact number, you expressly authorize us to contact you on that number via text message or telephone, including via prerecorded or auto-dialed calls.
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If Dell's support or repair service wipes or loses your data — even through their own negligence — they owe you nothing. All data-loss risk sits entirely with you.
IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO BACK UP ALL EXISTING DATA, SOFTWARE AND PROGRAMS BEFORE RECEIVING SERVICES OR SUPPORT (INCLUDING TELEPHONE SUPPORT). DELL AND/OR YOUR THIRD-PARTY SERVICE PROVIDER WILL HAVE NO LIABILITY FOR LOSS OR RECOVERY OF DATA OR PROGRAMS, OR FOR LOSS OF USE OF SYSTEM(S) ARISING OUT OF THE SERVICES OR SUPPORT OR ANY ACT OR OMISSION, INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE, BY DELL OR YOUR-THIRD-PARTY SERVICE PROVIDER.
How these were found
Consumer Terms of Sale is version rev. 09MAY2025 (most recent revision date shown at the bottom of the document) and the North America Privacy Statement is marked 'Last Updated: May 27, 2026'. Both documents were read in full directly from dell.com via browser_open on Oct 1, 2026 (no third-party mirrors used). Dell's Consumer Service Contracts (subscription/service auto-renew terms) are referenced by the Terms but were not individually read; no auto-renew clause was found in the documents reviewed, so the autorenew score reflects hardware-sale terms only. The 15% restocking-fee detail comes from a search-result snippet of a Dell community page restating Dell's U.S. Return Policy, not from the policy page itself.
These notes come from the original draft and are not independent verification.