Why do companies think they can get away with treating their customers like nameless "consumers" who only exist to serve the purposes of the almighty corporation?
Spyware charge levelled at Lexmark
Allegations have been swirling around an online newsgroup this week that printer manufacturer Lexmark has been installing spyware on its customers' computers.Reports on the comp.periphs.printers Usenet newsgroup claim that Lexmark has been planting spyware on its customers' PCs in the form of undocumented software that monitors the use of its printers and silently reports back to a Lexmark-owned company website.
One user said that after initially denying the allegations, Lexmark acknowledged installing tracking software that reported printer and cartridge use back to the company for survey purposes. He claimed that Lexmark said no personal data was taken by the program, and that it was impossible to identify anyone by it.
The article goes on to point out that the software includes a registration step that captures your name and the serial number of your product. The program embeds itself in the Windows registry and quietly sends information back to a Lexmark International website in Kentucky.
Even if the program doesn't currently capture personal information, wouldn't it be nice if the installation process informed you what the program would do? Wouldn't it be even better if you had the option to cooperate or turn this feature off? And who's to say that the software couldn't be modified to supply more specific data in the future? Or that someone with malicious intent couldn't figure out how to use this for other purposes?
Sadly, I'll have to add Lexmark to the list of companies I stay as far away from as possible. Companies pull this crap because they don't pay a sufficiently high price for bad behaviour. We need to work on that.
