Lenovo Security News: Court Fines Lenovo $3.5 Million Following Complaints on Pre-Installed Adware
Lenovo needs to pay a fine of $3.5 million to settle a case with the Federal Trade Commission following complaints that they had been pre-installing their own version of adware from Superfish.
The FTC released a statement on Tuesday that confirmed that Lenovo had agreed to settle the complaints filed by the Commission that said the leading laptop maker had allegedly pre-installed adware-infected programs in the devices they sold between September 2014 until early 2015.
In the statement, acting FTC chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen said: "Lenovo compromised consumers' privacy when it preloaded software that could access consumers' sensitive information without adequate notice or consent to its use." She added that the same could be said for the online security protections used by the consumers, which had also been exposed and thus made the situation more serious.
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While Lenovo reportedly agreed to settle the case and pay the said fine, the Commission's documents indicate that the company "neither admits nor denies any of the allegations" with regard to the complaints of pre-installing consumer laptops with adware.
In the 2014 complaint filed by the FTC, Lenovo had allegedly worked with advertising company Superfish to develop an adware called VisualDiscovery.
According to reports in 2015, the adware had the capacity to pass through the user's security settings and show pop-up advertisements on the computer. The user, who is then plagued with unsolicited ads, will be persuaded to pay a fee to upgrade their system to get rid of the ads.
In its own statement, Lenovo said: "While Lenovo disagrees with allegations contained in these complaints, we are pleased to bring this matter to a close after 2-1/2 years."
The laptop maker maintained that after learning what the VisualDiscovery does, they have started to work with cyber security companies "to disable and remove this software from existing PCs."
"Subsequent to this incident, Lenovo introduced both a policy to limit the amount of pre-installed software it loads on its PCs, and comprehensive security and privacy review processes, actions which are largely consistent with the actions we agreed to take in the settlements announced today," Lenovo added.
