For those who may remember, my house in Austin, Texas is full of Netgear WAX630 WiFi 6 APs, for about one every 1200sq ft (~114m2.) Other than a quick incident where we had a WAX630 AP fall in the garage using the stock mounting hardware, they performed extremely well. From a hardware side, I was extremely happy with the solution. From the management side, Netgear Insight needs some work. Since I have not seen this elsewhere, it is time to get into why.
Netgear Insight Needs to Change
Last year, I had a pretty decent idea that we would be moving STH. Despite having a ~6000sq ft home (everything is big in Texas) with a great view and 1696 strands of fiber in the walls, I knew the move was going to happen, just not when. As a result, the idea of spending $9.99 per AP per year after the first year’s free subscription seemed silly. The Ubiquiti UniFi U7 Pro’s are only $189 each and the Netgear WiFi would still work if the Insight management subscription expired.
As a result, and even though the move did not happen for some time, I went into an IT freeze at home in 2023. That meant that the Insight App that I mostly just used for the initial setup of the APs was not being used regularly. That $50-60/ year was going to new APs.
There, of course, was an Insight Basic subscription option, but that too seemed unnecessary since I did not need to manage any of the APs once they were installed. Netgear, did not like the fact that I did not want to continue paying for the service I was not using. Instead, I now have a collection of around 300 emails, one a day, telling me that I need to pay to use a service I do not want.
I have not logged into the service for a long time and do not wish to. One might think that the automated e-mails would come with an “unsubscribe” link. They do not.
The Netgear marketing e-mails do not have an unsubscribe link.
Final Words
I gave this feedback to the Netgear team today. To me, the $50-60/ year was not the most important thing. Instead, I do not want to pay $50-60/ year. It is just another subscription that I do not wish to pay since it is a nuisance.
Also, and perhaps just as important, Netgear is still sending me status notifications of the Insight service. I still get AP firmware update notification e-mails from Netgear. In October 2023, around six months after I let the subscriptions expire, Netgear was still sending me e-mails that a location went offline. Since Netgear Insight knows the status of my APs, whether online or offline, they are collecting data from my environment. That data is being used, in theory, to make products better and market services for Netgear. I am not sure why, if I am not using Insight, that I should be paying for Netgear’s data collection.
The daily reminder e-mails, data collection when I am no longer a paying customer, and the unsubscribe feature need to be added immediately. I am sure there are MSPs, small businesses, and installers out there who love Netgear Insight. At the same time, for smaller installations, I am getting a daily reminder on why we will not be installing these either in the Arizona home or in the new STH studio. It is a complete nuisance.
Hopefully, my discussion with Netgear today will lead to change.
Block all traffic to the insight cloud on your firewall. That doesn’t solve the egregious email problem, but at least they won’t get your data.
More visibility is needed for this. Netgear has been around for decades. I don’t think those emails are legal since they’re marketing emails to induce you to pay for a service and they don’t have an unsub link.
No unsubscribe link on emails? That’s where you report them to the FTC for violating the CAN-SPAM act.
@Jim Z these are technically speaking not marketing emails and I’m sure they put this in their T&C that they can send these emails. It also confirms that Netgear isn’t the brand to look at for any install for me.
@David: Terms and conditions can’t override the law. Any unsolicited correspondence falls under it, even if you agreed to it in the past. There has to be a way to unsubscribe.
It’s also the case for EU jurisdictions. The GDPR gives the customer the right to request all information a company has on said individual, and to request total erasure of the data.
And that tells me never to get any Netgear which require/use Netgear Insight.
That is yet another example of why I NEVER deploy gear from NetGear… Intrusive, abusive and down right anti-consumer… Surely your plight can be assisted from your state AG.. I would not hesitate one minute over this.. Its a crying shame you need to basically expose the company for what they are doing; rest assured that if they are doing this to you; a prosumer that buys ink by the barrell and Electricity by KW; they are doing this likely 10x worse to the little guy that doesn’t understand what the heck is being abused here…. This is OUTRAGEOUS.. NETGEAR, STOP IT!
It seems like there’s need for greater clarity regarding a device’s possible relationships with its vendor(both disclosure at time of sale and restrictions on the vendor’s ability to alter the deal; so that disclosures at time of sale actually mean something).
There are certainly situations where “wall of the vendor; nothing but local management!” is not an adequate answer(though you should probably be deeply wary of any case where that option is forbidden); I suspect that there are plenty of people who don’t want to run a fancy on-prem wireless controller and are fine with paying netgear to avoid having to; or where havinga vendor tech dispatched based on SMART data is considered a virtue; but, bare minimum, it should be really, really, clear when this is a “the device is cheap because it’s just an inducement to become recurring revenue” situation.
If the constant vendor relationship is represented as optional it needs to be properly optional(as is absolutely not happening here); if it’s mandatory that needs to be a massive-red-warning-letters-on-the-spec-sheet thing; and if it was sold one way making any changes in the direction of more restrictive should be very serious business.
It’s very simple.
Block all there ip addresses/domains at the router.
Teach your email server to treat the emails as spam.
Add Netgear to list of vendors never to purchase from again.
Move on.
I mean, insight is /technically/ optional.
I have 3 WAX620 APs at home that I manage in local admin mode. No insight involved. Admittedly I’m old and refuse to pay for an extra interface layer when I can just manage my small network locally. Never signed up for insight, and never plan to.
I think NetGear sells gear in the EU, i doubt they handle the data erasure request differently between regions, so you could try the GDPR form to erase your data : https://preferences.netgear.com/privacy?cc=US