How do I get rid of Norton Popups

I'm in the same boat.  I've had enough of these offer pop-ups.  Here looking for tips of how to turn them off as the "special offer notifications" toggle has no effect.  If I can't find a way, byebye Norton.  

I could not have explained it any better. That's exactly how I think about NAV.  Mcafee and bitdefender are also bad. They bug you to the point of being harassed. Always trying to upsell using scare tactics. Large popup AD's on my desktop when I'm offline and doing work on my computer. Right in my face as rude as can be. And as soon as you close it another one pops up. I need anti-spam software to stop getting hacked by Norton. My computer is infected with a Norton virus spam bug.

I did that and they actually stopped for a while.  But now that they call them Service Notifications, they are back.  I tried again just last week and was offered a 30 day extension of my license while they looked into finding a solution.  The catch was that I had to start all over with customer service, get an escalation approved, and as a bonus complete a survey.

This has become a game that I no longer want to play.

For personal use I will sometimes try Ad supported software, and if it serves my need I will gladly pay the requested fee to have the Ads removed.  Every time I have done this the vendor has honored their promise 100%.

If you are using NAV retail product, you are paying for an Ad-free product.  No where do they disclose otherwise.  Yet this company whose revenue for 2020 is reported at $2.49 billion (US) finds it impossible to operate with the same integrity as those other companies.  

Maybe the alternative is no alternative.

I did turn off Special Offer Notifications on several machines about a week ago, and have not seen any nag popups since. But others have indicated they might come back.

N.Y. Times' Wirecutter has an antivirus recommendation: None. They say "Most people can use Windows Defender alone to keep their computers secure."

But I don't think it filters spam. So there's the choice - Norton's spam or everyone else's.

This month (October 2021) the Norton spam notifications have been out of control. I have "Special Offers" turned off, but that doesn't make a difference.  These notifications are constant and trying to upsell me on new features or scare me into using features I'm not interested in.  Here are the 5 popups from just the past 3 weeks (see attached), with no end in sight:  

10-02

10-07

10-08

10-13

10-20

These popups are now happening so frequently that they're distracting me from my work and leaving me feeling angry.

Could not agree more. We pay money to have Norton as the exclusive provider of spam on our computer. Doesn’t seem right. No real solutions offered, only optics without any real help or support. They don’t remove or block all spam, only stuff that is not theirs. What a greasy racket. 

If anyone knows of a good option to use (and recommend)  instead of Norton please let me know

A possible solution, so far:

I have not gotten a new popup in 3 weeks.  It may be because someone from Norton read my rant and flipped some secret inhouse switch for me, but unlikely.  It surely isn't because Norton changed their policy.  If that were true, this conversation thread would have ended rather than continued.

So, this is what I did.  I left the last message they sent as unread.  That means in my taskbar notification area my Norton icon has a blue circle with the number '1' added to it.  (See attached.)  Also when I open My Norton the envelope icon in the middle section has a matching blue circle.  (Also attached.  Yours may vary depending on the launch view you've chosen.)

This is truly an imperfect and unproven long term solution, but at this point I've grown tolerant of the blue circle and will ride this out until my subscription expires (and is not renewed).  If I still cared, I should complete the experiment by marking the item as read to see what happens.  

Long term solution:

In my opinion, nearly every message, other than those relating to program failures, local virus identification & remediation, and updates, is an advertisement from Norton:

• In Administrative Settings you can turn off:
  • Special Offer Notifications (pure ads)
  • Norton Task Notifications (I value these as just Norton saying Look at Me!)
  • Norton Community Watch (I selfishly turn this off because I do my own research regarding programs I install and find that participation benefits Norton more than myself.)  Note: always scan installation media before installing and don't rely on just Norton's product.
• What Norton controls is the rest of their Message system.
  • I don't need Norton to tell me that some credit card or other company has been hacked.  If it is one that I have a relationship with, I most likely already know it and can do nothing about it.  And neither can they.  This is truly just an indirect pitch for you to buy into their LifeLock product line.
  • What I find most irritating are what are currently called Service Notifications.  
    • They will say I am not using Norton Backup or some other element of their suite I've purchased.  (And in all cases I am not using their product because it is inferior to others I use for the same purpose.)
    • They have told me that if I want to check if Norton is running, look for the green check mark.  Come on.  Give me a break!
    • What this reveals is:
      • Norton is watching you in ways that has nothing to do with anti-virus protection and that is not acceptable to me.
      • Norton thinks it's customers are idiots.
• The conclusion then?  Do not renew.  Also, do not get yourself trapped into relying on their ancillary products such as Cloud Backup, AntiSpam & Password Manager.  Plan ahead and find alternatives.  

Widowmaker:

BTW, it's funny that Norton automatically tagged your post as a "Possible Solution", when your solution is to leave Norton.

there is a box above Reply message editor for users to tag "Possible Solution" 

Users may submit feedback/concerns thru Norton Feedback &or Product Suggestions -

And another pop-up (see attached PDF) trying to upsell me on more products/protection, based on the hack of a company I don't have an account with.  So every time some company reports a breach I'm now going to be harassed into spending more money, whether it affects me or not.  Norton should permit users to control these notifications.  I've said "no thanks" numerous times, but if there's a new company that reports a hack Norton feels like it's a golden opportunity to engage in additional fear mongering and push out more spam.  Why would a company try to alienate its customers with these overly aggressive tactics is beyond me.  I just saw an ad for Avast and will give them a try once my Norton subscription ends.

I saw this notice and had the same thought.  So Norton notifications are now used to share news stories?  If I was a user of this service and they knew this because I was storing credentials for it in a Norton vault, then it would be useful to let me know.  Otherwise, an ideal AV product should be invisible, and certainly shouldn't be using scare tactics to cross sell products when I'm already running their premium suite.  I always though the product was overly aggressive when a subscription was coming to its end but now the notifications span the entire subscription time.  Way too many notifications and cross selling pop-up ads.  I thought I was going to stick with Norton until the end of this subscription but I can't take it anymore, it's getting removed. 

Since I'm on Windows, I'm leaning towards just using Microsoft's built in Defender.  It's improved greatly over the past few years and MS is now recognized as one of the top security companies.  If you are only using Norton for antivirus, Defender is the way to go.  If you are using other Norton features like VPN, cloud storage, LifeLock and password manager, there are other services out there which specialize in these and in many cases there are good free options.  Personally, I don't trust Norton enough to use it for these type of services so I'm overpaying for what I have anyway.   

Solution:  Uninstall Norton.  If you have Windows 10, there is nothing you need to install for MS Defender, it is built into the OS and will enable itself when Norton is removed.  

More details and additional options: 
Best antivirus software for 2021 - CNET

Agreed. See you all on the other side. Norton is dead to me.

This appears to be a dead end.

If you review this Forum's documented history for this issue, you will find that it has been discussed for over 5 years, and all of the older threads end with the following: 

1. THIS FORUM THREAD NEEDS A SOLUTION.  And most significantly:

2. This thread is closed from further comment.

3. And finally,  the issue has not gone away.

Even short term fixes, such as my earlier one, fail to stop ALL the various unwanted messages.  They are constantly trying to grab your attention, whether it is:

• the announcement of a new logo and/or corporate name
  • Does that mean a new corporate attitude?  NO.
• breaking public news that some large company has been hacked,
  • So maybe you want to upgrade your account?  You know they would never tattle on someone who they have a relationship with.
• a program message that nags you just for the attention,
• a program notification that suggests you should try all these other features so you become more dependent on them,
  • Their Password Manager failed as a commercial product, so let's bundle it with something and get users hooked not by its performance and value, but rather by its in your face presence.
• The fact that Promotions now appear on my desktop entitles me to a refund, in my opinion, but that hasn't succeeded either.

Norton, et al, has no intention of stopping this practice.  The record shows they have done it for years. 

• The former complaints are consistent with our current ones. 
• They have done it to both enterprise and consumer users. 
• Our concerns have been reported by forum monitors as well as through their Product Suggestions and Norton Feedback portals. 
• They have surely lost customers, but not enough to care. They have grown to be a Fortune 500 company, for now.

What they want you to do is feel you need and recognize them, so much so that you will autorenew and pay them more than what they receive from their distributers.

Norton Lifelock, in its present state, is no longer a company that innovates much.  (Read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NortonLifeLock)  Instead it buys companies with the intent to integrate them, resell them as they decline, or simply remove them from the competitive environment.  They have nothing in common with Peter Norton's company that they purchased in 1990, beyond the rights to use his name.  He didn't even have an antivirus product when purchased.

And this is the company that wants you to trust your internet security to by selling you, in essence, a Lifelock insurance policy.  Not that I will ever experience this, but can you imagine what it would take to submit a claim on that policy, much less a monetary reward?  We can't even get popups removed!

Read the Security Concerns and Controversies in the above cited Wikipedia article. The company has a history of product failures, scareware tactics, and mistrust issues.  More than should be considered acceptable for a company who is dependent on having integrity to accomplish their business model.

They can be replaced, and should be.

This works for blocking those popups that Norton exclusively controls.

1. Go to Settings
2. Select Administrative Settings
3. Under Silent Mode Settings choose User-Specified Programs
   1. See SMSettings.pdf
4. Click Configure [+] and enter the path to a program that you have running all/most times.
   1. See UserSpecifiedProgram.pdf

In my case, I run Thunderbird in the background almost continuously.  So that is my entry at step 4.  So as long as I have Thunderbird is running, Norton leaves me alone.  A decent explanation of how this works is available if your click on the "?" at the end of the row labeled Silent Mode Settings.

Norton's explanation states that all Norton background tasks will be placed on hold while your selected program is running, but I have found that that statement is not entirely true.  Antivirus protection is NOT disabled.  I have tested this by running a program that will trigger a false positive virus warning and NAV still identified it and warned me in spite of being in ​​​​​​​Silent Mode.

I am not certain if Live Update will run automatically, so I just scheduled it with Windows Task Manager to be safe.  You can do the same for running scans.  Task manager events are not affected by Norton's Silent Mode Settings.

bjm_

There are several different kinds of popups which can be grouped because they share common features.

Category 1 are essential and the functional purpose of NAV.  They include notifications such as:

• The program failed.
• Your subscription has expired.
• You have a virus.

Category 2 are optional.  Norton calls and defines them as:

• Background Tasks Notifications
  • "Norton Task Notification lets you show or hide the notifications that appear when your Norton product runs an automatic background task. When your computer is idle, your Norton product runs Norton-specific automatic background tasks such as Full System Scan, Automatic LiveUpdate, and Insight Optimizer."
• Special Offers 
  • "When On, your Norton product notifies you about promotions, discounts, or special deals."
• Control these items with the appropriate entries under Administrative Tools.  But remember, Norton has narrowly defined these items.  So while I would like to assume that Special Offers includes ALL Marketing, it does not.  Your reference links don't change anything more than what is stated above:  just direct sales pitches.

Category 3:  Everything Else

• For the Consumer there are no obvious opt outs for these.  And none of these qualify as an essential function.
• This is where this thread is now focused.  I refer to them as Windows Taskbar Notifications because that is where they primarily appear.  They have titles such as:
  • Data Breach Notifications, Data Security Notification, and similar
    • These always end with a solicitation to upgrade your security.  (I call that marketing.)
  • Service Notifications
    • They are inane nags such as:
      • This is our new logo.
      • Why don't you use our backup program so we can rent you more cloud storage space?
      • Our password vault program is only available in a bundled package.  
      • A green circle with a white check symbol means we are working for you 24/7.
    • To me these are one very small step above "Like Me on Facebook".  And again, I call this marketing.

In direct answer to your questions:

1. Does "this works" for Norton marketing popups
   1. Marketing?  What do YOU mean? If you mean:
      1. Special Offers (Category 2, item 2), then No.  Use Administrative Tools for that.
      2. Other marketing like Use this feature, Be afraid because a large company was hacked, etc, then Yes.
2. or "this works" for Norton background tasks popups?  
   1. I assume you mean Category 2, item 1, so No. Use Administrative Tools for that.

The solution I have proposed is for Category 3 notifications.  The others are not relevant to this thread as it now stands.

bjm_:
Okay...I thought OP was asking about Category 2. 
I thought users are annoyed by Category 2. 

I think it's pretty clear, at least from my attachments, that users such as me are annoyed by what Froederick has defined as "Category 3".  These are non-stop spam messages with information often neither helpful nor relevant, and are frankly scare tactics aimed and trying to upsell existing customers on additional products. There is no way to stop them. Even if you click "No Thanks", the message will spawn again in the near future. 

Here are two more that came in just the past few days alone. Note that these are just after the two other ones I posted just about a week ago.  Note that I was not on a website that allows for remote connection to computers in the traditional sense (no FTP/SFTP, Telnet/SSH, XWindows, etc.). By Norton's definition, anything that the user initiates over a network is a "remote connection". There seems to be no end in sight to this BS, apart from the expiration of my subscription.

co-op:
I successfully turned off unwanted Norton Antivirus notifications (Category 2 and 3 defined by bjm above) by using Administrative Settings as others have pointed to AND by turning Internet Security OFF. That said, I now have a new problem. Norton no longer recognizes my browser and thus many help features and any other Norton functions that require internet connection do not work. By this I mean, after running LiveUpdate I get the message that one process product update NGC Product Update failed to complete. When I select View Summary to confirm this is the module that did not update the "More Information" link does not work and instead a Help pop-up says, "Unable to open a browser." I can open my browser. Does anyone know how to fix this so that Norton can open one too (that is when I want to know why Norton is doing or not doing something)? For the record, I selected Norton for their AntiVirus product only as it had high ratings over other products mentioned in this blog. However, it appears some of you have found that has changed over the years and perhaps my perspective is now out of date. If Defender is consider better these days by experts like PC World or other techie analytical types who test these products for consumer info I am interested. And I say that only because I'm frustrated with the lengths that I have had to go to in order to shut Norton up.

Before you look much deeper, restart your computer and keep trying the LiveUpdate.  Sometimes that is all that is required to get balky updates to complete. 

When you look at the classic browser in your Norton product, what browser is shown as the default? Try changing it to another browser on your system and test.

I moved from AVG eight months ago after a few years of use as I got sick of the occational advert from them. I have just unsubscribed from Norton as I truely beleive this is the only solution to the nightmare which is Norton. I have 4 PCs at home using this SW and whichever one I'm on has popups every time I use it. Some pop up in windows that can't be 100% seen so I can't close them and have to use ctrl F4. It's a complete joke. One PC I use for live music and had to de install since this behavior interupted a performance, I was so angry with Norton and their idiot marketing department. I have tried all the suggested fixes to no avail. Norton won;t be happy until they have ONE user left who have a full subscription to everything they do. What a terrible company.

I would never use or recommend Norton to anyone after this terrible experience.