topbanner_forum
  *

avatar image

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
  • Tuesday March 19, 2024, 12:21 am
  • Proudly celebrating 15+ years online.
  • Donate now to become a lifetime supporting member of the site and get a non-expiring license key for all of our programs.
  • donate

Last post Author Topic: Norton Identity Safe -- Free Download  (Read 27000 times)

IainB

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2008
  • **
  • Posts: 7,540
  • @Slartibartfarst
    • View Profile
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: Norton Identity Safe -- Free Download
« Reply #25 on: June 01, 2012, 03:03 AM »
Just updated my post above with this:
...It is all quite thought-provoking.
Copied here is section 10 of the agreement (from OCR of image):
Spoiler
10 Privacy; Data Protection:
From time to time, the Software may collect certain information from the Device on which it is installed, which may include:
 
— Information on potential security risks as well as URLs of websites visited that the Software deems potentially fraudulent The URLs could contain personally identifiable information that a potentially fraudulent website is attempting to obtain without Your permission. This information is collected by Symantec for the purpose of delivering the functionalities of the software, and also for evaluating and improving the ability of Symantec’s products to detect malicious behavior, potentially fraudulent websites and other Internet security risks.

— URLs of websites visited as well as search keywords and search results only if the Norton Safe Web feature is enabled This information is collected by Symantec for the purpose of providing protection and of evaluating and advising You regarding potential threats and risks that may be associated with a particular Web site before You view it.
— Executable files and files that contain executable content that are identified as potential malware. including information on the actions taken by such files at the time of installation These files are submitted to Symantec using the Software’s automatic submission function The collected files could contain personally identifiable information that has been obtained by the malware without Your permission Files of this type are being collected by Symantec only for the purpose of improving the ability of Symantec’s products to detect malicious behavior Such automatic submission function may be deactivated after installation by following the instructions in the Documentation for applicable products.

— The name given to the Device during the initial setup of such Device. If collected, the name will be used by Symantec as an account name for the Device under which You may elect to receive additional services and/or under which You may use certain features of the Software. You may change such account name at any time after installation of the Software (recommended).
— Status information regarding installation and operation of the Software This information indicates to Symantec whether installation of the Software was successfully completed as well as whether the Software has encountered an error- The status information could contain personally identifiable information only if such information is included in the name of the file or folder encountered by the Software at the time of installation or error- The status information is collected by Symantec for the purpose of evaluating and improving Symantec’s product performance and installation success rate Symantec may also use this information to optimize its web-pages .

— Information contained in email messages that you send through the Software to Symantec to report as spam or as incorrectly identified as spam These email messages may contain personally identifiable information and will be sent to Symantec only with your permission. and will not be sent automatically If you send such messages to Symantec. Symantec will use them only for the purpose of improving the detection ability of Symantec’s antispam technology. Symantec will not correlate these files with any other personally identifiable information.
— Information contained in a report that You may choose to send through the Software to Symantec when the Software encounters a problem The report includes information regarding the status of both the Software and Your Device at the time that the Software encountered the problem The status information about Your Device may include the system language, country locale, and the operating system version for Your Device, as well as the processes running. their status and performance information, and data from files or folders that were open at the time the Software encountered the problem. The information could contain personally identifiable information if such information is included in, or is a part of the name of the files or folders open at the time the Software encountered the problem This information will be sent to Symantec only with Your permission. and will not be sent automatically. The information is collected by Symantec for the purpose of correcting the encountered problem and improving Symantec’s product performance. This information will not be correlated with any personally identifiable information.

— The Internet Protocol (lP) address and/or Media Access Control (MAC) address and the Machine ID of the computer on which the Software is installed to enable the Software to function and for license administration purposes .

— Other general, statistical information used for product analysis, and for improving product functionality.
In additon to the terms and conditions above, the following terms and conditions will also apply to Your use of the Software on mobile Devices :

— The Software may access the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) in order to generate a hash that ensures anonymity The hash is used to analyze and aggregate equipment data for statistical purposes. The IMEI is not collected or stored by Symantec. This information is used for the purpose of identifying the telecommunications device eligible to receive Content Updates for the Prerelease Software This information will not be correlated with any other personally identifiable information, such as Your account information. Alter the service has terminated the data is retained in statistical form exclusively for internal research.

Unless it is expressly defined as optional. the collected information as set out above is necessary for the purpose of the functionality of Symantec’s products
Information may be transferred to the Symantec group in the United States or other countries that may have less protective data protection laws than the region in which You are situated (including the European Union) and may be accessible by Symantec employees or contractors exclusively to be used in accordance with the purposes described above For the same purposes the information may be shared with partners and vendors that process information on behalf of Symantec Symantec has taken steps so that the collected information. if transferred. receives an adequate level of protection
Subject to applicable laws, Symantec reserves the right to cooperate with any legal process and any law enforcement or other government inquiry related to your use of this Software This means that Symantec may provide documents and information relevant to a court subpoena or to a law enforcement or other government investigation. In order to promote awareness, detection and prevention of Internet security risks. Symantec may share certain information with research organizations and other security software vendors. Symantec may also use statistics derived from the information to track and publish reports on security risk trends by using the Software. You acknowledge and agree that Symantec may collect, transmit, store, disclose and analyze such information for these purposes.
CPS / IDS 1.0 / IE

In the doco somewhere it also says that it uses your unique CPU ID, or something, to hash/encrypt data.
NIS is your Friend...     :o

tomos

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • ***
  • Posts: 11,958
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Norton Identity Safe -- Free Download
« Reply #26 on: June 01, 2012, 03:45 AM »
Odd what you say about MSE - it has never seemed to slow down any of the 6 PCs I have installed it on. It seems to behave unobtrusively and seems quite fast.

I'm unhappy with it lately - it's slowing down things here a lot more than it used to (with no obvious reason).
Tom

Carol Haynes

  • Waffles for England (patent pending)
  • Global Moderator
  • Joined in 2005
  • *****
  • Posts: 8,066
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Norton Identity Safe -- Free Download
« Reply #27 on: June 01, 2012, 06:15 AM »
Interesting - I don't find MSE has any discernible impact on my system.

I was at a clients yesterday with a very slow computer. They had a current Norton subscription and so I swapped them to MSE and the speed up was very noticeable even without any other cleaning. Horses for courses I suppose.

Being cynical I suspect your original Norton removal wasn't complete (it rarely is IME of Norton even though they assure you it is) and interfered with MSE (wouldn't be at all surprised if that was deliberate). That's why I always use not only the normal uninstall routine but then use the Norton Removal tool to make sure it has all gone. (Interesting to note that Norton provide such a tool for uninstall issues - even for their latest versions).

I do the same with MacAfee - saw a computer a while ago that was slow and had some connectivity issues and had for some time. Turns out they had uninstalled MacAfee about 18 months earlier (apparently successfully) but there were still bits of the old firewall interfering with the connection speed which the MAcAfee Removal Tool got rid of and there was an instant system speed up and totally stable internet connection.

Stoic Joker

  • Honorary Member
  • Joined in 2008
  • **
  • Posts: 6,646
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Norton Identity Safe -- Free Download
« Reply #28 on: June 01, 2012, 06:43 AM »
Being cynical I suspect your original Norton removal wasn't complete (it rarely is IME of Norton even though they assure you it is) and interfered with MSE (wouldn't be at all surprised if that was deliberate). That's why I always use not only the normal uninstall routine but then use the Norton Removal tool to make sure it has all gone. (Interesting to note that Norton provide such a tool for uninstall issues - even for their latest versions).
-Carol Haynes (June 01, 2012, 06:15 AM)

+1 In a choice between NIS and a root kit ... I'd sooner trust the root kit. As at least they're highly optimized and have clear agendas.

IainB

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2008
  • **
  • Posts: 7,540
  • @Slartibartfarst
    • View Profile
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: Norton Identity Safe -- Free Download
« Reply #29 on: June 01, 2012, 09:52 AM »
...In a choice between NIS and a root kit ... I'd sooner trust the root kit. As at least they're highly optimized and have clear agendas.
Har-de-har-har. Very droll. Cynical and apposite.    ;)

Curt

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • **
  • Posts: 7,566
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Norton Identity Safe -- Free Download
« Reply #30 on: June 01, 2012, 10:45 AM »
Norton AV 2012 is $40 in USA, but more than double up here in Denmark:(

-----

@IainB - really fine OCR-job! How much did you after-edit manually? If only a little or nothing, I would really want to know the name of your OCR program!

------

Download by October 1, 2012 and enjoy it FREE of charge forever
-Norton Identity Safe

-it could just mean "lifetime key" => "for the rest of version 2012's life".

IainB

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2008
  • **
  • Posts: 7,540
  • @Slartibartfarst
    • View Profile
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: Norton Identity Safe -- Free Download
« Reply #31 on: June 02, 2012, 12:32 AM »
...@IainB - really fine OCR-job! How much did you after-edit manually? If only a little or nothing, I would really want to know the name of your OCR program!
Download by October 1, 2012 and enjoy it FREE of charge forever
-Norton Identity Safe
-it could just mean "lifetime key" => "for the rest of version 2012's life".

The OCR was done by MS OneNote. It seems to be a particularly good OCR tool - usually does a very good job of OCR, and with few errors - but that would always depend on the quality of the image being scanned.
How I did the text extraction:
The text of the agreement came up in a small scrollable, non-stretchable window at install time (you had to accept it before it would proceed with the installation). The text in the window was non-selectable (maybe an image?), so I paused at that point and hunted around for a separate text file of the agreement on Norton's NIS webpages. When I couldn't find one, I skeptically supposed that Norton would have deliberately made it difficult for the user to retrieve the agreement, for a reason, and that I might not see this agreement again unless I reinstalled NIS. Most of it was the usual legal "all care and no responsibility" sort of stuff, so I decided to only capture what seemed to be the most convoluted and interesting part - section 10.
So I took a screen capture of each sequential piece of text in the window, using the OneNote screen clipping tool - it came to 6 and a bit clips, all told. I arranged them all in the LH column of a two-column table in OneNote, then right clicked each image, selected Copy Text from Picture (which puts the OCR'd text to Clipboard), and pasted the text into the corresponding slot in the RH column of the table.
When I reviewed the OCR'd text I was surprised at the high quality, but figured that that would be attributable to the clarity of the clip. I started corrections (e.g., some lower case characters had scanned as upper case, a "/" had scanned as a "|") and then stopped as I realised that I had made 6 or so and they all seemed to be minor, so I was probably being too fussy - the thing read OK without needing any more corrections.

I didn't need to extract the text for my own purposes - it was just that I thought the text would be of more use to the DC forum readers than an image, and it would be copyable and searchable.
(The reason I didn't need to extract the text in OneNote in the first place was because I have set OneNote to automatically search inside all images for any relevant embedded text when you search for something. I think it is indexed. You can always extract the text - as above - as and when you might need to copy it. From experience, that searching of embedded text in images works with high accuracy.)

Back to that agreement section 10: it generally seems to be suggesting that you accept that you may have absolutely no privacy of your information and that Norton could do what the heck they wanted with your:
  • IP address.
  • MAC addess.
  • Machine ID.
  • IMEI.
  • Data.

As for the meaning of "lifetime", I suspect it may have been deliberately left ambiguous and open to interpretation. I certainly could never recommend that a client enter into such an agreement, and I wouldn't do it myself either. I'm not even sure the agreement would necessarily be legal in all countries. It will be interesting to see how many people actually fall for what looks like Norton's super-free offer to taking your privacy away for your lifetime use of the product. Who knows but that they may even intend to sell the data to certain government agencies?
I think the military-grade encryption-at-source approach - e.g., including (say) disk encryption, Wuala, X-Marks, or LastPass - would arguably be the most advisable and secure route to take for the medium/long term.
"NIS is your friend."
Yeah, right.
« Last Edit: June 02, 2012, 01:58 AM by IainB, Reason: Minor corrections. »