Recently Lenovo was caught selling PC’s with pre-installed adware that might have compromised user security. The program which goes by “Superfish” monitors a users actions to determine products or services that they might be interested in purchasing. This was done by Lenovo “to help customers potentially discover interesting products while shopping”. Lenovo has since removed the software from new machines and disabled the software on old machines. However the software on old machines still exists so users would have to manually remove the software themselves. They have yet to explain to users how to remove this software although it appears a clean re-install of the operating system would work.
My major problem with Lenovo is that they gave users adware which lead to a negative user experience. They didn’t give an option for the user to disable it and they didn’t make it public that their computers came with this software. This software isn’t new to me either. I have had clients who had this adware on their non-Lenovo PC and it was incredibly difficult to remove and caused major problems to their PC’s. So I don’t know why Lenovo would have made such a stupid decision to give it to their users. Well, that’s not true, they did it for the money they hoped to generate off of their users shopping habits. Instead this is going to be a major problem for Lenovo in the next few years as I know I don’t have any plans to buy a computer from them, and I won’t be recommending it to anyone either.
