Norton Safe Web

Norton Safe Web is a new reputation service from Symantec. Their servers analyze Web sites to see how they will affect you and your computer. Also, using the Norton Toolbar installed on your PC, they let you know how safe a particular Web site might be before you view it. If you need to find out more about how a Web site might behave, they provide more detailed information on Norton Safe Web. I have used this service for many years, and it works.

I've gotten a number of warnings that the pages I was trying to visit were a "known dangerous webpage". All the pages that I got this warning on are either companies I trust and have done business with, or links supplied by those companies (e.g. To surveys). I have a hard time believing this many legitimate businesses somehow have malware or are doing business with companies that have malware, plus none of my other malware detection software ever identifies a threat with them. So I decided to see how many complaints there are of Norton false positives - as it turns out, A LOT. Not just a lot of false positives, but a lot of people complaining about how hard it is for them, once their company has been tagged by Norton, to get any kind of response to get untagged. Seems like not only are these pages not actually "known" (only "suspected", and wrongly suspected, at that) to be "dangerous", but Norton is screwing with legitimate businesses by scaring away their customers (albeit probably out of incompetence rather than malice.)

Randomly decides that sites rated otherwise safe (eg by Google), I contacted Norton as I could not find an option to add sites to an exclusion list to be advised by Norton customer service that there is no exclusion list and the ONLY solution is to remove safeweb from the browser.

Also the "continue to site" link would not work, Norton customer service only response to that was 'you shouldn't be visiting these sites'.

Norton denied my review and my doctor's office is unsafe. I am so glad I cancelled my subscription effective this November. Avoid Norton.

I fix broken websites for a living. So when I remove and clean a site of malware or phishing etc, Google Safe Browsing, Phish tank, SiteAdvisor, Sucuri Malware Labs, SpamHaus DBL, Bitdefender and Yandex (via Sophos) all have great tools to de-list a site in a timely manner.

Norton Safe Web on the other hand is a night mare to deal with. Often weeks and months go by to no avail and their de-listing seems to go to a black hole.

I wish I could give it 0 stars, but 1 star is the minimum.