PepiMK
2006-08-06, 22:39
Symantec
From letters that Symantec employees (Mr. Ingenpass and Mr. Sanchidrian) send to Spybot-S&D customers:
Patrick Kolla is German living in Bochum (Germany). Patrick is well-known in his neighborhood for such scurrilous behavior [becomes immediately extremely abusive, insulting everyone].
These insults, along with quite a few other very personal attacks on Patricks person, have been received by many persons who wrote to Mr. Ingenpass and Mr. Sanchidrian directly. These responds have been sent by a Yahoo email address which did not respond to any queries, which means that this address is either one created by the two Symantec employees, meaning quite heavy personal slander by Symantec itself, or that Symantec passes along customers emails to external private persons, which is a clear privacy violation.
Anyway, in compensation, Symantec at least announced that it seems to want to leave the anti spyware market:
There is no product from the Symantec or Norton line that competes with Spybot.
Sony
The authorities have been in contact with Sony BMG by now, but only received lies in feedback, including that Patrick wouldn't have been even naming the email address in phone talks, and that Sony would of course block addresses where spam would be unwanted. Keeping in mind a dozen other attempts to solve privacy issues with German authorities (Landesdatenschutzbeauftragte), our final result would be that German authorities are quick to send a "please wait, WE will contact YOU again", but have been unable to solve, even unwilling to even do anything after confirming that it was an issue for them, in 9 out of 10 cases so far.
Apple
While Apple fixed the MiniStore bug and iTunes is clean by now, Apple didn't send some promised explanations even after monthly reminders, so our final result based on communications with Apple would be that while iTunes is clean now, the MiniStore thing wasn't really an oversight, but an attempt to see how far Apple can go.
More... (http://www.spybot.info/en/news/2006-05-26.html)
From letters that Symantec employees (Mr. Ingenpass and Mr. Sanchidrian) send to Spybot-S&D customers:
Patrick Kolla is German living in Bochum (Germany). Patrick is well-known in his neighborhood for such scurrilous behavior [becomes immediately extremely abusive, insulting everyone].
These insults, along with quite a few other very personal attacks on Patricks person, have been received by many persons who wrote to Mr. Ingenpass and Mr. Sanchidrian directly. These responds have been sent by a Yahoo email address which did not respond to any queries, which means that this address is either one created by the two Symantec employees, meaning quite heavy personal slander by Symantec itself, or that Symantec passes along customers emails to external private persons, which is a clear privacy violation.
Anyway, in compensation, Symantec at least announced that it seems to want to leave the anti spyware market:
There is no product from the Symantec or Norton line that competes with Spybot.
Sony
The authorities have been in contact with Sony BMG by now, but only received lies in feedback, including that Patrick wouldn't have been even naming the email address in phone talks, and that Sony would of course block addresses where spam would be unwanted. Keeping in mind a dozen other attempts to solve privacy issues with German authorities (Landesdatenschutzbeauftragte), our final result would be that German authorities are quick to send a "please wait, WE will contact YOU again", but have been unable to solve, even unwilling to even do anything after confirming that it was an issue for them, in 9 out of 10 cases so far.
Apple
While Apple fixed the MiniStore bug and iTunes is clean by now, Apple didn't send some promised explanations even after monthly reminders, so our final result based on communications with Apple would be that while iTunes is clean now, the MiniStore thing wasn't really an oversight, but an attempt to see how far Apple can go.
More... (http://www.spybot.info/en/news/2006-05-26.html)