Why should you pay first and choose afterwards?

Goal of our action

The goal of our action is to obtain a possibility for the consumer not to pay for pre-installed software during their computing purchase, so as to remedy the current software competition distorsion.

Join in!

Most importantly, sign the international petition in English or in another language!

Support. These organizations participate in the promotion of this petition.

Why is this action important?

When you buy a computer, a telephone, a tablet-pc, etc., you make your choice first, and then you pay. But meanwhile, quite often you first pay the licence of an operating system (Microsoft Windows, MacOS, etc) which you then choose to use or to replace with another one. As a result, the vast majority of us all use the operating system that mainly beneficiates from this forced sale. Our addiction is so high that even those actors that should be neutral in principle help this situation continue: state, administration, school, city administration, etc. We are thus technologically very dependent, hence vulnerable. Thanks to Edward Snowden, it is now established that intelligence agencies modify hardware (computers, routers, firewalls, etc) and software (Microsoft Windows, probably all Apple operating systems, probably one GNU-Linux distribution, etc) to massively listen to communications and illegally penetrate into computers. In such a context, the least thing for consumers is to have the choice of the software they want to install or use (from the BIOS and the operating system up to additional software). In other words, for operating systems and other software too, one must be able to choose before paying.

If you want to learn more

Using computers in the post-Snowden era. Read more.
List of computer manufacturers and their refund or choice policies.
In France, with the help of a dedicated team, many consumers have been to court. Read more.
In Europe, the law is very similar. One must be able to use the same legal arguments as in France. Read more.
In many countries, people have started getting refund. Join them.

Why did we choose Avaaz?

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