NortonLifeLock appears to be living up to its name
The anti-virus giant Norton is facing a barrage of online criticism for automatically installing the Ethereum crafter on users’ devices, which has turned out to be pretty useless and also really difficult to uninstall.
Norton has come under fire after several users expressed their annoyance on Twitter and Reddit at how difficult it is to rid their system of the bundled tool called Norton Crypto.
Their concerns were rapidly echoed by other users, who claim the feature costs customers more in electricity use than they make on the mining, yet allows the developer to make a ton of profit.
An experiment carried out by media outlet The Verge confirmed this, showing that a night of mining netted $0.66-worth of Ethereum but cost $0.66 in off-peak electricity.
The claims that the antivirus developer “sneakily installs cryptomining software” in computers and skims a commission on profits were soon disseminated by technology-focused media outlets, including PCMag, Krebs on Security, and Digital Trends.
Commenting on the backlash, a spokesperson for NortonLifeLock told The Verge that users can completely remove Norton Crypto by temporarily turning off Norton’s tamper protection feature and then deleting the executable file.
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