Sometimes I’m kind of amazed at how little companies keep any watch on their brands, and, more importantly, try to save their customers from being fleeced by sleazy types acting in their name.
Take this scenario, for example.
You’ve got some hardware. A scanner, perhaps. Or a printer. Or a mouse. A keyboard, perhaps, or
a webcam.
You’ve been using computers long enough to know that if you plug one of these things into your PC you need to install some software first. These are called drivers.
They usually come on a disk. But you usually lose the disk, or the drivers are old so you look online
for new ones. You know these are always free and that hardware manufacturers like you to have them because a) it means you’ve bought their product and b) there’s less chance that things will go wrong with the device if you’ve got the latest driver.
(Rule number one of customer support is to recommend new drivers as the solution to any problem. Problem: “My husband just ran off with the cell phone mast technician. Solution: “Have you tried updating his drivers?”)
So, you Google the company’s name and the word driver. HP driver. Acer Driver. Logitech driver. Intel driver.
What do you get? Well, you get a list of websites that offer the drivers. Nothing wrong with them. They’re probably the right ones — owned by the company, legitimate in every respect.
Then above them you’ll see, in the shaded area Google reserves for ads, a link to a website with the manufacturer’s name in it, and the words “official drivers”. Same thing with the sponsored ads to the right of the results.
Now if you’re not a veteran or, like me, not fully awake, you’ll think “hmm. This looks interesting. Maybe this is some new thing the company’s doing to speed up the boring task of drilling down through lists and lists of mindless product numbers, all of them more arcane and unmemorable than the previous one. Maybe I’ll give this a shot.”
So you do. And the website seems to confirm your hunch. There’s the manufacturer’s name somewhere in the website name, and its logo at the top, and even in the address bar, where it should be. There’s probably words like “driver support” after the company’s name.
Looked kosher to me, in my bleary haze. For most casual users it would look kosher too.
So you download the software, which promises not only to install your missing driver, but also check your computer for other outdated or missing drivers. Yay! A one stop shop to fix all those things that go wrong with outdated drivers.
Only it’s not. It’s a scam. Well, maybe scam is too strong a word. But the software you install — and you’ll pay for, if you didn’t wake up in time — isn’t official, it’s not connected to any of the 10 blue chip manufacturers it appears to be, and, most likely, it won’t fix your driver problem.
Those who have used it have complained it actually made things worse.
Now in some ways this is the common or garden bait and switch you see every day on the Internet. Folk try to lure you with one thing, and then sell you something else.
But actually it’s worse. I counted a dozen sites that masquerade as official sites of the big hardware manufacturers, all of them leading to the same piece of software.
Those companies I was able to reach to ask about this expressed surprise that the sites existed and reached for their lawyers. But if I could find them in half an hour of looking, why hadn’t they?
Hardware won’t work without software. We all know that. So we all dutifully try to get the right drivers for our gizmos.
But if we’re dutifully doing that, then manufacturers need to be dutifully patrolling the net
to make sure that we’re not getting duped into buying and installing dodgy software that at best doesn’t solve our problem but at worst, actually damages our computer. And probably makes us lose our hair.
Hopefully by now some of these sites won’t be around anymore.
But in the meantime, surf safely and, as they say on the roads, beware of reckless drivers.
*© 2009 Loose Wire Pte Ltd
This story cannot be reproduced without written permission from the writer. Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. You can reach him via email at jeremy@loosewire.org*
