The following are companies and products that I intend to avoid for the foreseeable future.
AOL are all over the news [August 8th 2006] after publishing the recent search histories of more than half-a-million of its users. Even though the search histories are grouped under anonymous user ID numbers, some of the search queries contained information that could be used to identify or guess the identity of individuals.
AOL have apologised for what they have called a mistake. But that doesn't alter the fact that several hundred thousand AOL users have had their search history for March to May revealed to the world. While the user IDs were made anonymous, AOL did not remove personally identifiable information from the search queries themselves, only from the user ID. Which is bad news for any of those AOL users who searched for their own name, address, phone number, social security number, or website domain during that time. Such search queries may help people viewing this data to identify the search queries as belonging to a particular person. Names, addresses and search details could potentially be used to craft identity theft scams.
To release such a vast set of data with no guarantee that personal details are removed first, AOL has committed a serious error. What should happen now is that the company be punished severely for this mistake, and AOL customers should flee the company in huge numbers. But probably neither will happen because government agencies don't like to upset big business, and AOL customers may just shrug it off. My advice to you if you are an AOL customer: find yourself an internet provider who protects your identity.
My site was previously hosted by 1&1. I migrated my site to another host because Google Sitemaps was frequently getting a response of 'Network Unreachable' from the 1&1 servers. 1&1 technical support blamed Google's algorithms, but that didn't seem to add up. I felt it was more likely that 1&1's server either couldn't cope with the load, or were deliberately configured to turn away Google's web robot some of the time. Either way, it didn't suit me.
On top of that, I was [April 2006] annoyed to be told by the billing department that my webspace allowance would not increase to match the package being offered to new customers, even though the title of the package was exactly the same. And the cost per gigabyte of excess traffic usage remained at £5.00 per gigabyte for any customer that had signed up before 5th July 2005, while newer customers would only be charged £0.99 per gigabyte [term 5.12 in the T&C, April 2006]. Plus I'd had a problem cancelling an unwanted domain, with 1&1 charging me money to renew it, despite my following very carefully the cancellation procedure they described (which included having to fax them a signed cancellation form).
In fairness, 1&1's cancellation procedure no longer seems to involve sending a signed fax, and I was able to cancel the hosting contract and transfer my domain quite painlessly.
Almost everything you may (or may not) wish to know about 1&1!
I am, unfortunately, a UK Online broadband customer [February 2006]. When the service is working, it's as fast as it should be. But when it's not working I'm left feeling helpless, and I've had several reliability problems with the connection. At one point, the connection went down completely for seven days.
The customer service I've experienced is abysmal. It took me several phone calls, totalling more than ninety minutes listening to soul-draining "please hold" messages at my own financial expense, to get through to a customer service agent, and I may as well have not bothered. She said casually that being without a connection for five days was nothing, and that in her experience she's known of customers going without a connection for one and sometimes two months. I was informed matter-of-factly that no partial refund would be made for the time without service and that I should just put up with problems like this because it's only a "consumer product", not a business product. She said my details would be passed on to tech support who would call me back with more information. I received no such call. If I wasn't trapped in a twelve month contract with UK Online, I would be going elsewhere. Very quickly.
After receiving a GPU heatsink from Komplett.co.uk, I could see that it was not going to fit inside my PC because of the position of the memory slots on my motherboard. (This was a point not mentioned on the heatsink manufacturer's site or on the vendor's site.)
In the UK, the Distance Selling Regulations apply to purchases made whenever the customer is not face-to-face with the vendor, which includes online purchases. The DSR requires a cooling-off period of seven working days. During this time, the customer can choose to cancel their order and return the items (in the exact same condition they received them in) to the vendor for a full refund. This is to allow consumers to examine items up close, as they would be able to in a high street shop, at no cost to themself.
As I hadn't even opened the packaging for the heatsink, I chose to cancel the order and sent the item back to Komplett.co.uk for a full refund [September 2005]. The only thing I should have paid for was the return postage fee. But Komplett.co.uk only refunded the value of the heatsink, whereas they are required to refund the full amount of the original transaction.
I informed Komplett.co.uk that they were required to refund the full amount, but they claimed that they would only be required to do so if the item had been faulty. (In fact, if the item had been faulty, they would also be required to pay for the cost of returning the faulty item to them.)
I contacted my local Trading Standards officer, and she agreed that my interpretation of the DSR was correct. So she contacted Komplett.co.uk and informed them they were in the wrong. They disagreed, and asked her to send them the relevant clause of the DSR terms. She did so, and they then claimed that they were not required to adhere to the DSR because they are in fact based in the Netherlands. The UK return address that I sent the item to was in fact a forwarding address that redirects items to an address in the Netherlands.
A company that uses a .co.uk address and displays prices only in sterling should not be claiming it has no ties to the UK. My recommendation is to avoid this company, and stick to companies that trade from the UK only.
I don't agree with sharing music over the internet — it deprives artists of money, and persuades record labels to abandon original (and therefore commercially risky) music, in favour of unoriginal, easy-to-sell rubbish aimed at the pre-teen audience. In short, I have no fondness for theft of music.
However, what makes me more angry is seeing record labels punish legitimate customers by employing dubious and intrusive methods of protecting their intellectual property.
Sony BMG have been releasing music CDs that contain a rootkit [November 2005] that installs itself onto your Windows PC (Linux and Apple Mac are unaffected). This rootkit attempts to force the user to play the CD through Sony's on media player, and limit the number of digital copies that can be made. Attempting to remove this rootkit by deleting the files that Sony's music CDs install will render the Windows system useless. What's worse is, Sony's rootkit is so badly written that it leaves the system more vulnerable to attack by trojan horse software.
And, because of the size and influence of a company as large as Sony, anti-malware firms are likely to be scared to write software that removes this unwanted intrusion.
Measures like this hurt the legitimate customer, while music pirates can still easily get hold of illegal copies of the music anyway. If anything, behaviour like this is going to persuade more people not to bother with the purchase of Sony CDs, and instead just let an expert rip the track and put it on the internet for them.
The only way to persuade Sony BMG not to attack legitimate customers of its music, is for enough people to boycott their products until they promise to recall all discs that are infected with this unwanted nuisance.
There are bound to be more companies added to this page.