Weekend Open Forum: The most 'evil' tech company?

Jos

Posts: 3,073   +97

It's been a lousy few months for Sony with all the PS3 hacking controversy, followed by a lawsuit that triggered a backlash from a group of gamers. Then the recent security breach on the PlayStation Network, which resulted in some sensitive user data being compromised and forced the company to take the service down.

Apple for its part was recently met with intense criticism after a report emerged last week claiming iPhones are quietly recording users' locations and saving the data to unencrypted files. It didn't take long for Google and other mobile players to start being scrutinized as well.

We hear stories like these all the time in the tech industry, sometimes unwarranted or blown out of proportion, and sometimes you just have to stop and wonder: "What were they thinking?"

In the spirit of those awful moments we ask you: which is in your opinion the most 'evil' tech company? In the poll below we've included a few that sprung to mind due to recent controversies, from anti-competitive business practices to privacy issues, peddling unfinished or buggy products, DRM-ridden software or simply a lack of tact when dealing with customers. You can check up to three and of course use the comments for the ones we missed.

Permalink to story.

 
Although I can see why Adobe is on the list, their pricing policy is pure evil, and their new system of making you pay for .5 upgrades is one of the lamest things I have ever seen. If I could find a good replacement for Illustrator/Photoshop combo I'd jump ship.
 
Apple, Activision and Sony to me. Foxconn would be a fourth, for how they treat their employees. I'm surprised no one has voted for them.
 
No wonder Apple is leading the pack, well one of the so far 31 reasons for it, is provided by me along with two other lesser evils ;)

By the way; it would be cool that whoever wins this poll, it's CEO's picture be placed in the article (preferably with horns).
 
treeski said:
Foxconn would be a fourth, for how they treat their employees. I'm surprised no one has voted for them.
I did for that reason exactly. Their employees are treated like cattle worldwide.
 
Rambus



/I win


( I'm not sure about most of the poll choices. Rather than evil Id say most were negligent, pitiful or pitifully negligent)
 
my god man! have you forgotten about C.E.R.N and the Super Large Hadron Collider? first they are creating Higgs Boson particles, and then a black hole that will devour the Earth!...for the love of humanity!!.....oh wait....Apple.
 
Sony! who else?? huge PSN hack the size of the ill fated Titanic, secret root kits, PS3 DRM and downgrading specs with every new version, but lets look at their past history;who resisted supporting mp3 in favor of, oh what did they call it....ATRAC...Sony! who kept resisting standard flash formats by introducing new ones, MS, MS pro, MS Duo, Pro HG, M2, MS XC, etc etc Sony! Apple is not much better, and as far as anti competitive behavior goes, number 1 for Microsoft!
 
EA and Avti are kneck and kneck, Id say Activision are Worse than EA, EA used to be bad but over the past few years have really got better.
 
Apple wins! ...errr. loses. nice products, bad lock-in.

Just watch the latest South Park...it will all make sense now.
 
Apple-Simply because of the fact that it is being ignorant regarding issues concerning user privacy and security.
Sony-Well,almost same as above.
EA-For simply forgetting its roots-PC GAMERS.Just dishing out DLCs for consoles and acting as if we pc gamers don't exist.
 
My friend: Microsoft, because they steal from Apple.

Me: Apple, since they scam their customers and overprice their products.
 
@Nima
Just tell your friend to do a search for 'Apple copied features from Microsoft' (you can reverse the query to know what MS copied by the way) ....... but if he could do that he would have done it already, enough said.
 
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