Magic Jack - Good or Evil? - Comments Page 5

I do believe you work or them... spyware is on it or you have given permission for them to spy in the future.. not sell what they find? I don't want to give them permission to advertise to me at all much less being able to "target" me because of my phone calls! You are an idiot if you can't see ...

I bought a MagicJack last week. Interesting coincidence, I immediately got several problems on my laptop, one of which being the following message that pops up every time on a reboot: Generic Host Process for Win32 Services has encountered a problem and needs to close. Also, I now ALWAYS get redirected when I click on a specific web site using Google or Yahoo search engines. Ironically, I get often redirected to some unknown Anti-virus web page. I have no proof that all this is caused by MagicJack, but the coincidence is overwhelming because all this cr*** started on the same day I installed MagicJack.

EDITOR'S NOTE: I'm not an apologist for Magic Jack, but I'm sure this was a coincidence. It just doesn't make sense for any well-known company to include malware in their product. If proven, it would destroy their reputation and credibility. I suggest you try MBAM to rememdy the issue. See http://askbobrankin.com/malwarebytes_antimalware.html

amazing the paranoia that people have.
some people just have nothing better to do but to start a blog about a product that they probably tried and did not like.i could be wrong about that but imho, its over blown crap. thx bob for enlightening us.
good article thank you

I have been considering magicjack and have not been happy with what I have been reading.

The magicjack website (looks/feels like a hardsell scam imo) and the lack of a uninstall button for their software (odd for any software) has seriously put me off this product/company. It just doesn't feel right to me.

Although it doesn't appear to have been proven I wouldn't be surprised if there was a limited amount of spyware involved.

What respectable company leaves off the software uninstall option.

I am really quite disappointed.

Michelle: MJ adds an entry to the Windows Control Panel Add/Remove Programs section so it could be uninstalled from there. MJ also makes available an uninstall app on its website: search the FAQ or "uninstall".

If you think the MJ website is bad I invite you to check out x10.com!

i don't know about spyware but magic jack is a scam.
you prepay for a year, they waited til i filled out my contacts list and then discontinued me. no way to even access my messages, and they had full control of my account, no telling what they were doing with my 'active' inactive account.
good luck getting a human being to make any of this right, they just sh*t on the user, soon they'll probably change the name so as to screw the same people twice.
also, NEVER TRUST A COMPANY WHO HAS BOUGHT THIER OWN sucks.com site so as to hide criticism.
if you type in magicjacksucks.com all you get is just an ad for their 'award winning' service.
its not an honest product/outfit.

I don't know what the fuzz is about; Facebook is probably worse and the world loves it. I have owned one of these gadgets for almost two years now. I have just spent one month is South America calling all over the USA and Canada daily, and it has become a staple in my gadgets to carry. It's a lot cheaper than Skype-to-landline and does a fine job.

Bought a M.J. about 1 yr. ago. Used for few months. Worked inconsistently. My phone number from M.J. was long distance with my local phone commpany. So local people had to call long distance to call me. Also, found you could not call with or without calling long distance. The M.J. customer service could not solve the problem saying this was due to the phone company (Windstream). It became useless. The customer service is the pits and not very knowledgeable about the device and there is no way to contact them except through the M.J. website.

MagicJack is something I have been using for a few years with some bad audio at times. I have received and tested the plus and want to return it but their customer service does NOT exist. I tried the chat and after several trys and waiting for as much as 40 minutes I cannot get any reply. I could recommend them if they did not have that irritating audio on their site and replace it with a customer service phone number.

Magic Jack company sells or gives away your email address registered with them. This isn't a hypothesis, it is a fact. I'm a system administrator who runs our own email server. Because of this, we can create an unlimited number of email addresses. The advantage to this is that anytime a company requests your email address, you can create a very unique address tailored just to that company. Then if/when you get SPAM, all you need to do is look at who it was sent/addressed to to determine which company released some/all of your personal information. This process caught AmeriTrade's security breach which eventually forced AmeriTrade to send out a notification to all AmeriTrade clients telling them of this breach in security. This occurred some 4 years ago (so those users with AmeriTrade accounts will remember this). Anyway, it only took a few weeks before I got SPAM on the Magic Jack's unique email address registered with them. Just to make sure it wasn't a fluke, a new email address was registered with them that in part used a sequence of letters, numbers and characters (from KeePass Password Safe) making it utterly impossible for it to be another fluke. Again, within a few weeks the new email address was getting SPAM on it. I contacted Magic Jack to inform them about this issue and they denied it was even possible. They were extremely uncooperative and didn't even take the time to listen to why I 100% knew this issue was occurring. I immediately uninstalled the Magic Jack software (yes, there is an uninstaller but it isn't publicly available - the Magic Jack company uses it for clients that are having problems with the software in order to attempt a 'clean' reinstall). The uninstaller isn't a complete uninstaller though and still some manual deletion of files and registry entries was necessary for a complete removal. Because of this we will never, ever use the Magic Jack system again.

Jason

Jason (the so called system administrator) lol. I started out as a sys admin for my company yrs ago before moving on up. One of my duties while in that role was maintaining an email server as well. I assure you that, if you were to do your duties, you might find that your email server is an open relay or has been compromised on some level which is exposing email addresses to be harvested or mass emailed. Although, I do definitely applaud your efforts of email tracking, I do the same thing with gmail accounts for various online purchases/subscriptions. LOVE all the "technical" comments on here from obviously non-technical people. I think I even read the word "registry" word being slung around a couple times...lol..

All of you that are paranoid enough to think magicjack is spying on you are idiots. I'm a so called "conspiracy nut" and am well aware of how to track others tracking me. It does nothing of the sort. Please, those who are saying this, get back on your meds! rofl!

Patty your are one sick Puppy, what kind of dope are you using?