Lenovo agreed on Tuesday to resolve a dispute with the Federal Trade Commission (PDF) for the scandal Superfish, to pay 3,5 for millions of dollars as a fine, and to implement a series of measures that would prevent similar cases in the future.
The construction company has allowed a company called Superfish to install one bloatware VisualDiscovery on hundreds of thousands of systems built in August 2014. The software allowed the collection of sensitive personal information from customer computers, such as login credentials, social security numbers, and many other data.
Lenovo admitted the problem a year later and released a special tool for removing bloatware, describing its collaboration with Superfish as a "significant mistake." Lenovo then promised to keep its systems free of any malware.
Αυτό δεν σταμάτησε την FTC να ξεκινήσει νομικές ενέργειες εναντίον της Lenovo και σαν μέρος του διακανονισμού, απαγόρευσε ρητά στην εταιρεία να διαθέτει προσυναρμολογημένες λειτουργίες λογισμικού που θα μπορούσαν να καταλήξουν σε διαφημίσεις στα προγράμματα περιήγησης. Με άλλα λόγια, η Lenovo θα πρέπει να αναφέρει την αλήθεια για κάθε ειδικό feature of the applications that come pre-installed on the devices it sells.
In addition, all the models της Lenovo που θα κυκλοφορήσουν τα επόμενα 20 χρόνια θα πρέπει να διαθέτουν προ-εγκατεστημένο λογισμικό security which will have to go through a security check by a third party. If the product serves ads, consumer consent will be required as to whether they want them on their devices.
Hopefully, the FTC will implement more such measures in companies that do not respect the consumer, but their main concern is to earn as much as possible. A good example is Microsoft with the application Get Windows 10 who withdrew (after too many reports).
According to FTC's Terrell McSweeny, the Superfish application was using GW10's practices to mislead Lenovo product users.
