[Update]
False positives – that’s the update following the investigation by Samsung and others. I’m personally very glad to hear that – it effectively seems to have come down to malware detection software making the wrong call, and then a supervisor at Samsung making a really wrong call. Anyway, we can all relax now. Privacy – yep, Samsung believes in that, clearly. (Thanks to adrift_in_space for pointing out the correction on the Samsung article over at Network World.)
[Original article below]
It’s articles like this that make me glad that the only Samsung product I have in my house is a TV – and it’s not connected to the internet. It’s downright spooky and creepy.
Samsung responds to installation of keylogger on its laptop computers.
Honestly, you have to read it to believe it. Apparently a Samsung technical support supervisor admits that Samsung knowingly (i.e., deliberately) installed keyboard logging software on their laptops before they were sold so as to:
“monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used.”
If this is true, I see a big and nasty class action lawsuit looming for Samsung. And they’d totally deserve it.
It’s a great pity. Like yourself I bought a Samsung TV and part of the reason was it was running Linux and there was a community developing additional modules to use with the TV. There is something geeky and cool about being able to telnet to one’s TV and NFS a media store.
It’s a great piece of stupidity on their part. Like yourself, this will be the last Samsung device I buy for a while. Because it’s not just this stupid decision that concerns my, it’s what it says about a company’s culture which thinks such a practice is acceptable.
The article on Networkworld now has some updates. Apparently an anti-virus product reported a false positive, someone at Samsung gave out some misinformation, the alarm bells rang and ….