14 DAY TRIAL // Lenovo reached a settlement deal in a class action suit filed by consumers who discovered that their privacy and online security was affected after Superfish's VisualDiscovery was pre-installed on their laptops, as reported by Bloomberg Law.
"In early 2014, Lenovo and Superfish entered into a business partnership to install Superfish software called VisualDiscovery on 28 of Lenovo’s laptop models. VisualDiscovery was not disclosed to consumers," says the motion for preliminary approval (PDF).
According to a "SuperFish Vulnerability" advisory published by Lenovo on their support website following the discovery of the pre-installed software by consumers, the VisualDiscovery comparison search engine software was designed to work in the background, intercepting HTTP(S) traffic with the help of a self-signed root certificate that allowed it to decrypt and monitor all traffic, encrypted or not.
The same Lenovo advisory regarding the SuperFish pre-loaded software says that the Lenovo Notebooks affected were the E-Series, the Edge Series, the Flex-Series, the G-Series, the Miix-Series, the S-Series, the U-Series, the Y-Series, the Yoga-Series, and the Z-Series.
The consumers who filed the class action suit against Lenovo, the Superfish software Lenovo added to their laptops was also degrading their computers' performance by running continuously in the background consuming system resources and injecting ads into visited websites.
The Superfish adware software added to roughly 800,000 notebooks
"VisualDiscovery was installed on nearly 800,000 Lenovo laptops sold in the United States between September 1, 2014 and February 28, 2015," also states the settlement agreement, "On January 18, 2015, in response to mounting complaints about the effects of VisualDiscovery, Lenovo instructed Superfish to turn it off at the server level."
The settlement agreement also states that Lenovo has to make a $7,300,000 payment which will be added to the Settlement Fund started by the $1,000,000 payment made previously by Superfish.
Out of the 800,000 who bought the laptops that came with VisualDiscovery pre-installed, the 500,000 ones who registered their devices with Lenovo or bought them from retailers such as Best Buy and Amazon will be contacted directly by the Chinese company and informed about the settlement agreement.
The rest of the customers who cannot be reached straightaway will be targeted by Lenovo using multiple online advertising platforms, from Google to Twitter and Facebook.
