TeamViewer has stated that they will stop performing checks for commercial use of their remote control product in regions heavily affected by the Coronavirus.
TeamViewer is a remote control software that is commercial organizations can purchase to offer remote support and for non-commercial, or personal, users to use for free to control their computer or help friends and family.
Even personal use of TeamViewer is meant to be for free, some users are erroneously detected as being used for commercial use.
When this happens, their sessions will be disconnected and they are prompted to purchase the program with various alerts, some comical, as shown below.
With more people working from home, friends and family helping each other with technical issues, or some using it for commercial reasons without a license, many TeamViewer users have started to receive the dreaded "Commercial use detected" alerts.
Once they receive this alert, their TeamViewer ID is added to a bucket of users who will continue to see this message when using TeamViewer. The only way to use TeamViewer again for personal use is to submit a request to have their TeamViewer ID reset.
After reaching out to the TeamViewer, TheRegister was told that TeamViewer is stopping the checks for commercial users in regions heavily affected by the Coronavirus.
"We have stopped checking connections for commercial use in heavily affected regions like China and Italy already some weeks ago and are currently implementing that for lots of other affected countries including UK," TeamViewer told TheRegister.
In a statement to BleepingComputer, TeamViewer stated that the USA is region where commercial checks are not being conducted anymore.
"Yes, the US is also included now in the regions where we don’t check commercial use anymore to allow individuals (not commercial companies) to use TeamViewer in the current crisis situation for whatever purpose they need it," TeamViewer told BleepingComputer.
Update 3/25/20: Added TeamViewer's statement about the USA.
Comments
gf1701 - 4 years ago
From my experience, it seems likely that the majority of those "commercial use detected" alerts are false positives, and possibly worse: thinly-veiled attempts by the Teamviewer company to diminish the number of free users and increase their revenue. And they don’t even provide a personal-use license option: the cheapest plan comes at a cost of $49/month—almost $600 per year. After getting the dreaded “commercial use detected” warning myself and unsuccessfully trying to go through the channels provided to contest this, I tried directly addressing the issue with Teamviewer’s CEO, Oliver Steil. He had someone contact me, and after some back and forth I finally—after 5 weeks—got my account reset as a personal user. However, Mr. Steil took no action to determine why these false detections were so frequent or how to decrease them, or to find out why his company was making it so difficult to challenge them. He flat-out denied that it had anything at all to do with discouraging personal use and increasing Teamviewer revenue. I also asked him why he didn’t just drop the free-use option and require a small fee from personal users, in exchange for a limited number of hours of usage per month; he did not respond to that.
A couple of months after my account was reset—and three weeks after my last use of Teamviewer—I once again received the “commercial use detected” notice. At this point I decided to find an alternative to Teamviewer, as it was obvious that this was just going to keep happening. That it took Teamviewer until March 25th to exclude the U.S. from those completely unreliable checks just reinforces for me the notion that the company will go as far as they can to maximize revenue, no matter who it hurts.