Am having a change of heart of late. Am going to wipe the slate clean, for my site, for my photography, and for my ill feelings towards various companies that have been on my boycott list. Part of the reason is because the companies change. Part of it is because it is energy better spent being more creative.
Sometimes, you encounter a company that does things which you consider to be reprehensible and unforgivable. They might be minor issues, but when a company produces products which puts personal information at risk, or produces products which exemplifies an attitude that puts the end user/customer at the bottom of the list or not at all, then I feel it is time to boycott them.
Below are the companies and products I will not do business with, due to behaviour and policies that I find to be detrimental to the end user.
Companies and Products I Personally Boycott
Belkin
Produced routers with software that periodically routes your traffic to an advertisers' website. Has been known to do this with http/https sessions, putting banking information at risk. This was done without the end user being notified.
From my point of view, this was a serious violation of trust for their own profit. Lost trust = lost business.
- Help! My Belkin Router Is Spamming Me!
- LWN: The Belkin Router Fiasco
Best Buys / GeekSquad
The Geeksquad was busted for fake repairs, theft of personal information from peoples' laptops, and overcharging people for simple fixes or non-existent issues. As someone in the IT field, folks like those at Best Buys and Geek Squad gives hard working tech folks a really bad name. Bad service, excessive fees, invasion of privacy, and in some cases fraud, kills the trust I have in a business/brand. If there is no trust, there can be no business.
- Consumerist: Geek Squad Stealing Porn From Laptop
- Best Buy/Geek Squad Rip Off
- Consumerist: Geek Squad Charges $415 to replace a hard drive and makes customer retrieve data files himself
- Geek Squad Computer Repair Scam
An over priced store that more often than not, tries to force customers to pay additional service fees for products and goods. The service fees are for "tunings", "enhancements", or "security enhancements", which are nothing more than them opening up a brand new box, running software updates(partially sometimes), and repackaging the box back together(sometimes missing discs, cables, etc).
- Best Buys 3d Syncing Fee
Attempted firing of an employee for videos made on their own time, unrelated to the store:
- Best Buy Tries To Fire Employee over iphone4/EVO video
- Best Buy Decides Not To Fire, But Employee Feels Workplace Awkward based on What was Said to Him
