Share Your NETGEAR Armor Experience

BTW, the model is Orbi RBK852, but apparently your site isn't updated with your current products, because it didn't allow me to select that.

Like others, I was mysteriously signed up for the trial version of Armor without realizing it. Not only is that lack of transparency disappointing, but it feels like the very kind of malware implementation one expects hardware/software combinations like this to squash. It seriously damages the trust I have.

Further, the point of the whole Armor exercise could easily be mistaken as a ploy to steer all your customers towards playing for a subscription service for a product/service without clearly articulated benefits. Even those benefits that are claimed are damaged in credibility by the previously mentioned lack of transparency. You're asking users to send links and install software on local/client devices without really demonstrating how their information will be protected--I don't know how it will be protected from unknown/untrusted actors, and I don't know how it will be protected from Netgear and/or Bitdefender.

And like others, I believe basic/core security features should be built-in to the product, not paid add-on features or services. It's sort of like car companies making you pay extra for safety features that keep you from dying in crashes--the safety/security of your customers should be basic considerations, not profit centers. Also, it smells a little bit like a protection racket.

I'm sure that some of the things that seem like anti-transparency measures are meant to be sophisticated features that promote ease-of-use, and that your marketing and/or engineering people decided not to trouble customers by taking them into the technical weeds, and I appreciate that. There are some companies that do that very well. Your implementation is clumsy at best and doesn't inspire confidence.

Now, independent of my rant about your processes and practices, I've noticed a few things about Armor, some good. It does appear to have caught some ugliness on a couple of sites I visited, and I like getting notifications when devices join the network. But there is a little bit of granularity in the reporting that would be nice to have.

Also, my security score has ping-ponged between 80 and 85 over the last several days with no actual changes to the configuration of the network or the Armor implementation. It started out at 84 9 days ago. Then dropped to 80 4 days ago "because you have a number of devices without on-the-go protection" though no more or fewer than I ever had allowed on the network. Then it increased to 85 "because Bitefender security was installed on my device" though it didn't tell me which device, and I didn't knowingly install Bitdefender Security on any devices. Then it dropped to 81k today for the "on-the-go devices" reason again. I haven't made any specific interventions at any turn, and havne't implemented any of the suggested improvements it recommended. This may all be normal, but without explanation it just seems kind of arbitrary.

Your marketing fluff talks about adding a Netgear or Bitdefender VPN service without talking about any of the features (encryption policies, privacy policies, speed, geographic endpoints) that people use to evaluate VPNs. As far as I know there's no way to use the Orbi (Nighthawks can be flashed to use DD-WRT firmware instead of Netgear's to do this) to connect to 3rd party VPNs that actually do let you evaluate the quality of their service offerings. Even your "on-the-go" protection isn't clearly distinguished from whatever is happening on the router...it takes a while to figure out that you're actually blindly supposed to install this other software on all your devices.

In the end, this product/service basically seems half-baked, like it was written by a committee of the marketing and engineering departments, with the marketing departments in charge. You're asking customers to place a whole lot of their data in your and Bitdefender's hands without much explicit explanation of how that stuff is supposed to be protected. The priority doesn't really seem like security--that just seems like sort of a buzzword and a necessary complication to a business opportunity to get in on a subscription model service. 

Let your security and customer service people be in charge of the product for a while and it might actually turn out to be useful.