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Comment by sigmar | Hacker News Reader

The "Lenovo.TVT.CustomerFeedback.Agent.exe" that this article labels as spyware is explained on lenovo's website below. Did the author bother using google? The program reports if you are using lenovo's apps for usage statistics.

https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/ht102023?tabName=...

"Some applications in the preload collect usage data that is transmitted to Lenovo. This includes statistics about which features/settings are being used and how often they are being used. The data does not include any personally identifiable information (PII). Lenovo uses this information to improve our applications and focus on the features that are being used the most."

Seems reasonable to me.

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Isn't the humorous part of all this in how the system is running Windows 10 anyway and collecting far, far more data than this poor CustomerFeedback thing is doing?

Good point

The last time around, they managed to leave all of their customers vulnerable to anybody who felt like it MITMing their HTTPS connections, even though they were only attempting to do some relatively minor thing.

Can we be sure that this app is as benign as it says it is? Given the history, I would not assume that until and unless it's verified.

I agree. It would be great if someone performed a packet sniff to check exactly what data is being sent.

But there seems to be lots of FUD in the comments on this post. If the apps are malicious, I hope someone finds actually evidence

Totally agreed. There's a big difference between "given precedent, we shouldn't trust this" and "this is definitely spyware."

No, burying notification of telemetry systems with unknown privacy impact (and most likely sloppy coding/encryption practices (if any!), as is standard for oems) in a eula that is probably 10+ pages of dense text is the opposite of reasonable.

Yet another reason to just buy macs. Apple doesn't do this shit.

Yea, and Apple's app store has no idea what apps you have on your phone.

The difference is obviousness. If you interact with the app store to buy an app, you clearly know you did so. If you run a spotlight search and it returns results from the internet, spotlight obviously queried the internet somehow.

Lenovo monitors what you are doing without in any way telling you, or the user taking any action.

I like iPhones and Macs but Apple certainly does more than just use Spotlight searches to query the internet. They also, for example, record and log your location without telling the user and without the user taking any action. This via cellular network and not GPS, so the user has no say in what is logged.

Exactly the type of thing Lenovo does that you imply Apple does not.

I agreed with you until your last line - apple has been doing stuff like this at least sense 2011[1]

[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/04/how-apple-tracks-your-l...

Apple wasn't uploading that data to their servers. It was only used locally for location accuracy.

au contraire:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_%28software%29#Priva...

Apple recently updated their privacy policy. Warrant canary removed. They now "cooperate with the law and protect their consumers" AKA we don't give a shit about you, we're selling your data.

I don't know how to find it since Google's keywoards are gamed so heavily by newer sites now, but a while back a programmer found GPS logs from his phone when he was using zero GPS apps.

> Seems reasonable to me.

Why? Gathering usage statistics without opt-in or clearly notifying users beforehand is unacceptable.

Sounds like what Google Analytics is doing for me, and I don't feel bad having that on my apps.

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