“Your New AT&T Internet Security Suite”

Posted on: February 20th, 2009

I’ve been hearing about these emails that AT&T sends out to all DSL customers and a couple of days ago I got it myself. I’d like to dissect it and answer the questions about it I got recently.

Mine looked like this:

First of all, it has a misleading verbage: “In order to protect your computer you will need to update your computer security software by downloading the free AT&T Internet Security Suite powered by McAfee®“. Most people already have an antivirus on their computers, totally independent of AT&T. So they won’t be unprotected if they didn’t download the new security software. This solicitation has been sent out to all customers regardless of whether they ever downloaded security software from AT&T, or not. I know I never did such thing and I still got this.

I don’t know what exactly is the point in sending out these emails to everybody. The problem is that many people don’t know what the status of their antivirus software is, then download this software on top of the existing one and the result is: a very sluggish computer. I’ve seen it in several cases from clients who told me that the computer got really slow after they downloaded and installed the software.

If I were AT&T I’d have sent an email like this:

“We are offering a free security software for our customers. If you had been using the security software that you have downloaded from AT&T then we strongly recommend you replace that security software with this one. If you already have your own security software installed on your computer then it is not necessary to download this software but we give you the option to do so if you prefer.

The new security software has higher system requirements and is not recommended to be installed on older computers. Here are the system requirements that you system needs to meet:
….

Before installing this security suite please remove other security software in order to minimize the chance of software conflicts and system slow-downs.”

That would have been a more honest approach and would have created less complaints and unnecessary service calls to clients whose computer suddenly got real slow.

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