I am an independent IT tech and since the Norton rewrite (?) in 2009, have recommended Norton Internet Security/360 to my clients as the consistently best internet security program available. I have recently been very dismayed with the Norton Toolbar, for 2 reasons.
1. ASK is an aggressively marketed search engine with (1) far too many ads at the top of results and (2) the results are significantly inferior to other search engines such as Google, Bing, and even newcomers such as DuckDuckGo. Moreover,
2. I consider ASK to be a PUP and many of my clients would remove the first P from PUP and consider it just plain Unwanted. ASK markets itself via the opt-out paradigm replacing the user's home page and search engine. A majority of my clients just whiz by the opt-out screen without unchecking the boxes, and then ask me where their home page went. Perhaps Symantec makes a penny or fraction of a penny on each ASK implementation (economics of scale) but this is not acceptable from an internet security program.
3. Although I click the Do Not Ask Again link for clients when prompted to install the toolbar, the Do You Wish To Install The Norton Toolbar continues to pop up.
Although I still consider NIS/360 a superior security solution, I am beginning to switch my internet security recommendation to Kaspersky's solution, because so many of my clients want ASK removed from their computer, and of course I certainly don't want it either.
This is a slippery slope you have placed a foot on. It is my recommendation that if Norton products wish to keep their reputation from a slow decline, ASK be removed from the toolbar and either replaced with a more ethical (and better) search engine. Alternately, when users click the button to install the toolbar, at least have a prominent message (not fine print) clearly stating that this will replace their current search engine with ASK, and have two choices: YES - replace my search engine with ASK , or NO - keep my current search engine.
Philip