Corporate Bullying

A few days ago, we received some reports from users that all went something like this: “Norton is blocking access to your site. It says the site has a security risk.”

First reaction: Panic! Did our site get taken over by hackers? Not quite… When reading the security report, it turns out that Norton had incorrectly classified a link from one of our receipt emails as a phishing attack. To be clear, the link does nothing else than redirect to the user’s website, i.e. there is no phishing going on, neither on our site nor the user’s site.

We immediately issued a dispute and request for re-evaluation with Norton’s website. And then… nothing really happened. After five days, it seemed that the red warning disappeared, but for the site dispute, the re-evaluation is still “in progress”.

Now, this would not be so bad if it was not for Norton’s massive userbase and the trust that they have. Besides the users that were blocked from using our app, a slightly more serious consequence was the 1-star review on the Shopify app store that popped up on Friday morning with just the text: “My Norton Antivirus software shows this site to have an identity threat.”

Needless to say, being wrongly flagged by Norton can have real consequences for a business.

And that is the main problem here. This whole ordeal reminds of me of some of the many things I hate about big corporations: Stepping on smaller businesses, misusing power and slow processes. I would go so far as to call it Corporate Bullying. Norton makes millions of dollars by tricking people into thinking that they need an expensive security solution (when they probably don’t). They can easily afford to make a few false positives when flagging sites because it has no consequences for them, only for the businesses in the receiving end. And when confronted with the problem, Norton does not care about us and our wrong security rating, nor do they take immediate action to rectify the problem.

The only thing missing here to make the bully analogy complete is if Norton came back to us and said that we need to pay them some “administrative fee” to remove the bad rating. Then they would truly have stolen our lunch money. I would not be surprised if that happened, but I hope that the story ends here.

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