Gen Digital
Information Technology
75
out of 100. Number 25 of 512, counting from the worst.
Where Gen Digital does well
- 60-day full refund on annual subscription renewals: 'you can cancel your contract and request a full refund within 60 days of purchase. For each annual renewal or free trial, you can request a full refund within 60 days of being charged' — more generous than most SaaS refund windows (community.norton.com/t/why-automatic-renewal/222248, citing us.norton.com product pages).
- Do Not Sell notice (us.norton.com/privacy/do-not-sell) states 'We do not sell customer personal information' and supports the Global Privacy Control opt-out signal plus cookie-based opt-outs — better than peers with no opt-out at all.
- Renewal price notification emails are sent before each renewal charge (up to 35 days early), and under the EMEA terms, materially detrimental term changes require 14 days' notice plus a right to terminate with a prorated refund (https://ae.norton.com/terms-of-sale, Section 19).
- The Norton Family privacy notice commits: 'We will never sell, rent, or otherwise provide your personal information or your child's personally identifiable information to any third parties for marketing purposes' (norton-family-privacy-notice-en.pdf on nortonlifelock.com).
US customers give up their right to sue in court, join a class action, or get a jury — disputes go to private arbitration instead, and the arbitration clause keeps applying even after you cancel. (The current US Terms of Sale, Feb 2024, contains an equivalent 'Disputes; Mandatory Arbitration' clause with the same jury/class-action waiver, per us.norton.com.)
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.
-
US customers give up their right to sue in court, join a class action, or get a jury — disputes go to private arbitration instead, and the arbitration clause keeps applying even after you cancel. (The current US Terms of Sale, Feb 2024, contains an equivalent 'Disputes; Mandatory Arbitration' clause with the same jury/class-action waiver, per us.norton.com.)
If You are a U.S. customer, You and Symantec agree that any dispute, claim or controversy arising out of or relating in any way to the Software and Services or this License Agreement, shall be determined by binding arbitration or small claims court, instead of in courts of general jurisdiction... You agree that, by agreeing to this License Agreement, the U.S. Federal Arbitration Act governs the interpretation and enforcement of this arbitration provision, and that You and Symantec are each waiving the right to a trial by jury or to participate in a class action. This arbitration provision shall survive termination of this License Agreement and/or the termination of Your Symantec product license.
-
Subscriptions renew automatically 'indefinitely' at whatever the 'then-current' price is — cheap first-year teaser pricing routinely jumps to full price at renewal, and they can charge your card up to 35 days before the renewal date. You must cancel before the charge day; trials require a payment method up front and convert automatically.
Unless cancelled and/or terminated, the Services shall automatically continue indefinitely, and you shall pay the applicable then-current prices as published by us... we store your payment method, the Services will automatically renew, and you will be billed, until you cancel. ... Renewal Cycle: automatically renews each year after the initial term, unless the subscription renewal is cancelled before the day you are due to be charged... Renewal Prices: may be higher than the price for the initial term and are subject to change. They are charged up to 35 days before the subscription is due to renew and we send you a notification email with the renewal price before.
-
Gen can rewrite the terms — including price and policy terms — for 'any other valid reason,' and can make changes it deems immaterial immediately with no notice at all. For materially harmful changes you get 14 days' notice and the right to exit with a prorated refund.
We may update or modify the Terms of Sale, or any term of your contract with us (including the price and terms of referenced policies), for one or more of the following reasons: i) to comply with the law... vi) to ensure better functionality of the services; and vii) for any other valid reason. ... We may make changes which are immaterial or to your advantage immediately and without notice.
-
They don't technically 'sell' data, but they share device identifiers, advertising IDs, hashed emails and browsing activity with third parties for cross-contextual advertising — you have to opt out (via privacy settings or Global Privacy Control), and the FTC's 2024 action shows this company previously sold detailed browsing data from Avast users via its Jumpshot subsidiary.
We do not sell customer personal information. Gen and our advertising partners collect certain pieces of information from our visitors, such as device identifiers, cookies, advertising IDs, hashed email addresses and usage activity. We and our partners may share this information with third parties to deliver ads for Gen products on our own and other web sites.
-
Cancelling doesn't delete your data — Gen keeps it as long as it claims a 'legitimate business purpose,' which is open-ended ('company policy,' 'resolve disputes,' 'enforce agreements'), with no fixed deletion timeline promised to consumers.
We will keep your personal data on our systems as long as necessary to provide you with our Services, or for as long as we have another legitimate business purpose to do so, but not longer than permitted or required by law. ... When we no longer have an ongoing legitimate business reason to keep your personal data, your personal data will either be securely disposed of, or deidentified through an appropriate anonymization means. ... If you cancel your Services, we may retain your information in accordance with this section: for as long as your membership is active; as needed to provide you Services; as required by company policy or legal obligation; as needed to resolve disputes; as needed to enforce our agreements.
-
Before being bought by Gen Digital, Avast spent six years (2014–2020) collecting users' full browsing histories through its antivirus and browser extensions — while marketing those tools as privacy protection — and sold the data to 100+ ad companies via its Jumpshot subsidiary. The FTC banned it from selling browsing data for ads. Relatedly, Gen's LifeLock paid $100 million to the FTC in 2015 (the largest FTC order-enforcement award at the time) for deceptive advertising and failing to protect customers' sensitive data — see https://www.benton.org/headlines/lifelock-pay-100-million-consumers-settle-ftc-charges-it-violated-2010-order.
Avast... agreed to pay $16.5 million to settle the FTC's charges... the FTC... said Avast 'unfairly collected consumers' browsing information through the company's browser extensions and antivirus software, stored it indefinitely, and sold it without adequate notice and without consumer consent.' The FTC accused [Avast] of deceiving users by claiming that the software would block third-party tracking and protect users' privacy, but failing to inform them that it would sell their 'detailed, re-identifiable browsing data' to more than 100 third-parties through its Jumpshot subsidiary.
How these were found
Documents relied on: (1) Norton 'TERMS OF SALE' for EMEA opened directly at ae.norton.com/terms-of-sale on 2026-10-01 (current version; the US Terms of Sale, Feb 2024, which contains the mandatory arbitration clause, was read only via official-domain search snippets because its direct URL was not recoverable verbatim — score leans on the verbatim Norton License Agreement EULA PDF on nortonlifelock.com for the arbitration text). (2) LifeLock Service Terms and Conditions (Americas) read via a verbatim workers.dev mirror of the official us.norton.com PDF (https://a.ifif.workers.dev:443/https/us.norton.com/content/dam/norton/pdfs/legal/en_us/lifelock-service-terms-and-conditions.pdf) — a mirror of the official document, flagged here per method. (3) Norton Global Privacy Statement EN PDF (norton-global-privacy-statement-en.pdf on nortonlifelock.com) and Do Not Sell notice (us.norton.com/privacy/do-not-sell) read via official-domain search snippets. (4) Norton 360 product-page renewal disclosure (us.norton.com/products/norton-360-deluxe) read via citation on community.norton.com. (5) Norton Internet Security/360 License Agreement 20.3 EULA is a legacy Symantec-era version but remains hosted on nortonlifelock.com; the current US Terms of Sale (Feb 2024) carries an equivalent arbitration clause. Document version dates are as hosted; companies may update terms after this research.
These notes come from the original draft and are not independent verification.