Great Topic!

With regards to the Automatic AV renewal ....
My real world experience:

The company I am complaining on Mc' Anti Virus services product...

In the process of educating and protecting parents from the Internet and any misinterpreted actions that they may perform on the computer, I decided to acquire an updated package AV product that "Does ALL" in AV / Email/ Firewall/ etc..realized the Mc Anti Virus company had a new product recently introduced on the market. I logged into Parent's Old Mc' Anti Virus web Account and had found that the OLD product subscription was automatically renewed when I know that when I had set this up for them year or so before, I had Opted Out of the Automatic renewal. I contacted the Mc Company and asked how this was automatically renewed when it was previously Opted Out of. Mc Company never responded and I decided not to follow up further due to the very slow response or no response at all.....But did login to make sure the new package purchased was not set for AUTO RENEW... Issue is being watched still....

Point: If these companies in a Database conversion or migration accidentally or intentionally trigger the "Opt In" field/ value how does the consumer protect or verify to the company the they DID NOT opt in.....there is no record on this....

There should be a two pronged approach this matter....Email from "company to user" to authorize or trigger the Opt In process....if the user never responds then the service will not allowed to Charged to the customer....

I don't do any automatic renewals. I use the online account number generators on my credit cards to make one time use numbers for online orders. Discovercard does this, as do Citicard and Chase I think.

For AV, I wait for vendors to start clearing out old stock when a new version comes out, then I buy a copy, and send in the rebate form.

I just bought a copy on Symantec AV 2006, and with the $20 rebate, have about $1.86 in it.

Having a secure system with full updates is worth at least 16 cents a month I think.