About a year ago, I decided to purchase a family subscription to Bitdefender as it was affordable, and gave you a 15 device protection plan with a dashboard to view all device status and incidents. I thought this was awesome, and Bitdefender had a really good reputation for being light and having high detection rates.
However here’s the part that is causing me to make this blog post and ask for a complete refund. Their business practices are terrible. They keep trying to upsell their other products in very annoying ways. They bundle their VPN product with this install, which OK, that’s understandable, so if you won’t want to try it, just uninstall it, right? Wrong. If you uninstall it, it will reinstall itself next time it updates, start the application, and be in your tray if you’re in windows or in your menu bar if you’re on Mac OS.
I contacted Bitdefender about this, and expressed my frustration, and basically they said, that’s too bad, you can disable it. I replied and let them know that the VPN re installs itself even if you uninstall it and will re enable itself. Eventually I just gave up, and dealt with this annoyance.
However, today was the last straw. I was watching a YouTube video in full-screen, when I got a pop up ad that was quite large advertising their VPN product. I first checked to see if I’m logged into the Total Security application so that it knows I’m a paid user, and I was. I can understand this type of behavior if I was using a free version of their software, however I’m a paying user, I shouldn’t have to deal with their ads to up-sell me. That’s why I submitted a ticket to have my money fully refunded and I’ll move to another product. I posted this, to hopefully keep people from using their software if they are looking into it, and hopefully to force them to change their terrible business practices. If the ad shows up again, I’ll take a screenshot and update the post.
Update: Ad came up again right after making this post, I’ve put the ad as the main image above, and attached a screenshot below showing it with the Bitdefender Dashboad showing that I am logged in (personal info redacted) and that I have an active subscription. And it immediately came up on my Mac the second I opened the lid. I’ve since told Bitdefender that this “Special Offers” option should be Opt in, not Opt Out.
Update [23/10/2020] – Bitdefender has apologized, and sent feedback to the team that this should be opt in, not opt out. I hope the changes get made. I believe also the VPN has not been re installing itself anymore of recent. Thanks to Bitdefender for accepting criticism.
