Is www.consumerreports.org Safe?

Website uses auto-renew for subscriptions, and doesn't notify customers before card is charged. This is poor business practice. Also website makes it difficult to contact customer service. Twice hung up on me or lost connection when I was describing the auto-renew feature, even though I was being polite. Perhaps not intentional, but not sure because the issue to be resolved was complicated. I started leaving feedback on the site, which was then followed by several pages of questions with radio buttons forcing answers to questions that I didn't want to answer because it felt like data mining.

They have a new editor and direction. Blatantly lie about their practice. Automatically renew subscriptions, make it impossible to cancel. They claim to be non profit and independent from advertisers, thats why you have to pay to see content. Their claim "To maintain our independence and impartiality, we accept NO OUTSIDE ADVERTISING and no free samples" Yet are running doubleclick and optimizely java scripts among others. This is from their privacy policy "We work with third parties, such as ad networks, analytics companies and social networking platforms, and they may collect information about your online activities over time and across our sites and other online services." I suggest you look yourself. Shame, used to be such a good company.

My disappointment with Consumer Reports is growing. Just looked at their review of paper shredders. Their "top pick" was trashed by the user community in the reviews. I have the right to expect at least a degree of uniformity between CR's report and the user community but in this case CR recommend the item and the user community identifies it as junk. Further. Reviews posed in favor of other highly rated shredders are NOT convincing in the least. I suspect they are planted. CR does nothing to screen this stuff. They just post it to their site. We pay 5.95 a month to look at this trash.

Absolutely outstanding site. I use this site every time I'm ready to buy anything from laundry detergent to transportation. This should be in everyone's bookmarks. One of my top five favorites because it not only does the research and ratings of items but it invites consumer comments which makes it very consumer friendly.