Best Buy adds disclaimer to 'secret website'
439876
These are not the prices you are looking for An investigation by Connecticut's Attorney General over bait-and-switch charges has gotten electronics megalith Best Buy to budge over its allegedly deceptive "secret website."â¦
41774
Sears Holdings has come under fire from privacy advocates for making the purchase history of its customers publicly available on its Managemyhome.com Web site.Manage My Home is a community portal where Sears shoppers can download product manuals, find product tips, and get home renovation ideas.The Web site has a feature called &quot;Find your products&quot; that lets users look up past purchases. Ostensibly, this is designed to help customers keep track of items they&#39;ve bought from the retailer, but the site also lets them look up the purchase histories of other people.&quot;Sears offers no security whatsoever to prevent a Manage My Home user from retrieving another person&#39;s purchase history by entering that person&#39;s name, phone number, and address,&quot; wrote Ben Edelman, an assistant professor with Harvard Business School, in a blog posting.This is a violation of Sears&#39; own online privacy policy, which does not allow the company to share users&#39; purchase history with the general public, Edelman said.The information could be misused by scammers, said Benjamin Googins, a CA senior engineer who has also written about the issue. &quot;A potential burglar or scam artist could quite easily sit at home with a phone book, checking to see what people in a given neighborhood had purchased,&quot; he wrote.Googins said that he was able to track purchases as far back as 1978 on the site.One Sears customer said he was upset by the disclosure.&quot;It&#39;s pretty amazing that in 2008 a major corporation such as Sears Roebuck can show such blatant disregard for the privacy of its customers. It definitely will make me think twice before ordering from them again,&quot; said Doug Fuller, an Oakland, Calif., realtor. &quot;It&#39;s not like it is some rinky-dink company. This is a major corporation. And with all the identity theft going on, this is the best they can do?&quot; he said via instant message.A Sears spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment. Sears Holdings, the owner of the Sears Roebuck and Kmart department stores, is the third-largest retailer in the United States.This is the second time Sears has come under fire for privacy concerns in recent weeks. In December and early January, Googins and Edelman blasted Sears for&#160;downloading invasive comScore Web tracking software&#160;to some users of its MySHCcommunity.com Web site without adequate disclosure.Sears has defended its use of the tracking software, pointing out that users are notified of the software&#39;s features before they download it.
73839
Facing a copyright lawsuit from MPAA, company is trying to avoid disclosing user information.
358500
Electronics retailer Best Buy Co   launched an online service in partnership with video  hosting site Mydeo on Tuesday, through which its customers can  store and share home movies and videos via the Internet.
207000
Blog: The video is safe, but the download mod it advertises is not.
496928
After a former Dell sales manager posted bargain-hunting tips in a blog, Dell tried to have the blog deleted. Later, the company said that effort had been a mistake.
735175
Connecticut's attorney general announced a lawsuit Thursday against Best Buy Co. Inc., accusing the nation's largest consumer electronics retailer of deceiving customers with in-store computer kiosks and overcharging them.
517676
A "limited" number of digital picture frames sold by Best Buy under the Insignia brand during the holidays were contaminated with malware that can spread to PCs, the retailer said.
374000
Group seeks changes for more privacy during Web searches, like using an opt-in cookie instead of opt-out.
83522
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is warning Web sites that leak its Black Friday ads before Nov. 19 that they could face legal action.
150344
It was recently made public that Best Buy's Insignia brand 10.4" digital picture frames were found to be shipped with a virus, the company is now dealing with complaints individually.
509015
Business & money: The secret online codes you can use to obtain real discounts at some of Britain's biggest retailers
372734
Best Buy is under investigation by Connecticut's attorney general after consumers complained they were denied deals found at the electronic retailer's Web site by store employees who pulled up a lookalike site that listed higher prices on some merchandise.
373044
Best Buy finds itself in the embarrassing position of having to explain its lawyer's conduct after he admitted to falsifying documents in a class-action lawsuit against the company.
428206
Sears Holdings is facing a class-action lawsuit after&#160;making the purchase history of its customers public&#160;on its Managemyhome.com Web site.The lawsuit seeks damages as well as an accounting by Sears to determine whether the Web site was misused by criminals. It was filed on Friday by New Jersey resident Christine Desantis, who is represented by KamberEdelson, a technology law firm. KamberEdelson is best known for its recent settlement with social networking site Facebook over its sending of unwanted text messages to recycled cell-phone numbers.&quot;It&#39;s a pretty simple case,&quot; said Jay Edelson, a partner with the Chicago-based law firm. &quot;Sears decided to put private information of its customers up on the Web site and make it publicly available. They did it without telling their customers that it was going to happen ... and they really did it for their own financial reasons.&quot;Manage My Home is a community portal where Sears shoppers can download product manuals, find product tips and get home renovation ideas. The Web site had a feature called &quot;Find your products&quot; that ostensibly was designed to help users look up past purchases.Last Thursday, researchers at security vendor CA pointed out that the feature could be used to look up the purchase history of any Sears customer, an apparent violation of the company&#39;s privacy policy.Manage My Home could easily have been misused by criminals, Edelson said. For example, a robber could gain access to a victim&#39;s home by posing as a Sears repair person, using the information available on the site. That could be incredibly scary, he said. &quot;They have a duty to keep that information away from the public.&quot;Sears disabled the &quot;Find your products&quot; feature&#160;on Friday, saying it would re-introduce the feature once the company figures out a way of ensuring that the information cannot be viewed by unauthorized third parties.However, the retailer was informed of the problem weeks before it took the feature off-line, Edelson said.In late December, CA researchers also criticized Sears for&#160;downloading invasive comScore Web tracking software&#160;onto the desktops of some members of its MySHCcommunity.com Web site without adequate disclosure.KamberEdelson is also investigating that matter, Edelson said.&#160;
210408
On page 10 of 54-page diatribe A Harvard researcher has accused one of America's biggest retailers of sneaking privacy-stealing spyware from ComScore onto customers' machines.â¦
249716
Online ecommerce? No sweat Microsoft and Best Buy have announced a partnership to meet the needs of small business customers who would like to establish a web presence but are reluctant to create sites on their own.â¦