Lenovo Collects Usage Data On ThinkPad, ThinkCentre and ThinkStation PCs

I have to start this story off with these three letters: WTF

Lenovo, who has done lots of stupid stuff over the last little while is doing more stupid stuff. Via Computerworld, here’s the story on their latest bit of stupidity. Michael Horowitz reports that a refurbished ThinkPad he bought includes Lenovo spyware under the guise of “Customer Feedback”. After some digging around, he found the following in a support document: “Lenovo says here that all ThinkPad, ThinkCentre and ThinkStation PCs, running Windows 7 and 8.1, may upload ‘non-personal and non-identifying information about Lenovo software application usage’ to 112.2o7.net.”

You’ve got to be kidding. The application is apparently made by a company called Omniture. Here’s the details from the Computerworld article:

According to Wikipedia, Omniture is an online marketing and web analytics firm, and SiteCatalyst (since renamed) is their software as a service application for client-side web analytics.

So, while there may not be extra ads on ThinkPads, there is some monitoring and tracking.

Why do they do this? For a few extra bucks? Are they spying for China seeing as they’re a Chinese company? What’s the deal here? I’ve said it before and I will say it again, this sort of stupidity by Lenovo is why I don’t recommend their computers to my clients. Ever. You should avoid them like the plague as well as this company don’t deserve your money.

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