Lenovo, the Chinese laptop manufacturer company, has reached an agreement with a consumer group that filed a class-action lawsuit against the company for installing adware in its laptops. In 2015, a group of consumers filed a lawsuit against Lenovo after security researchers found that the company’s laptops are pre-installed with “Superfish” adware.
According to the settlement between both parties, Lenovo will pay a total of $7.3 million that will be divided amongst the affected users. The company that developed Superfish adware will also pay an additional $1 million that will be split amongst the users with adware laden laptops.
For the Superfish adware fiasco, Lenovo also paid $3.5 million to certain state authorities to pacify them. This is not the first time Lenovo has been accused of such charges.
Earlier, the company was blamed for installing unremovable software on its laptops that wouldn’t delete even if users wiped hard drive or re-installed Windows. It was found that Lenovo was taking advantage of buffer-overflow vulnerability in LSE, which allowed the crapware to gain administrator-level privileges.
The Superfish adware caught the eye of security researchers in 2015, and it was discovered that the adware is collecting user data without their permission. Lenovo, at that time, refuted all the accusations and denied the installation of any such software in their laptops.
