Slashdot Mirror
Samsung Plants Keyloggers On Laptops
Saint Aardvark writes "Mohammed Hassan writes in Network World that he found a keylogger program installed on his brand-new laptop — not once, but twice. After initial denials, Samsung has admitted they did this, saying it was to 'monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used.' As Hassan says, 'In other words, Samsung wanted to gather usage data without obtaining consent from laptop owners.' Three PR officers from Samsung have so far refused comment."
They should be prosecuted over crap like this.
They will be. Sony got hit with tons of lawsuits, and they weren't using software that could steal your password. This just took corporate big brother behavior to a whole new level of invasive.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=11763089&postcount=3
Oh please. Take it from me -- I work for an "American Company" that is completely owned by a Japanese company and is completely run by employees of that same Japanese company. It's a lie. It's a huge lie. It's a lie on the scale of saying "santa claus is real." It's clearly and obviously not the truth.
Wow. [citation needed] much? Let's go down the list, shall we?
1) Not only can I find no evidence of a $500M figure ever having existed before your comment, but if they had made a settlement for a half billion dollars, Sony wouldn't exist today. Their operating income last year was just $342M (source). Fat chance that Sony could survive a $500M settlement hit. By all indications (i.e. because it's not mentioned in their annual filings from that year and there are no followup stories to be found), this did not impact their bottom line in any sort of meaningful way.
2) As for what the settlement actually was, they paid up to $150-175 per customer that damaged their PC in an attempt to remove the rootkit (see here), plus $5.75M in settlements to various states (source). That's it. It probably cost them less than $10M to settle the whole thing.
3) For a quick example of a company that can take a hit like the one you talked about, we all remember the Microsoft EU antitrust case from a few years back, right? The one regarding media players, where they were fined roughly $600M, and had followup fines of roughly $250M and $1.44B, all of which were extensively covered in the news since they were, at the time, the largest fines ever handed down by the EU (more info). But Microsoft was able to absorb the hit. Of course, they could do that since their operating income last year was about $24B (source), which is roughly 70x that of Sony's.
4) As for your DOJ claims, I can't find anything about government computers being infected (though I wouldn't doubt it) or the DOJ being involved at all. In fact, they never got involved, despite the public outcry and requests that a criminal investigation be launched.
Aside from government computers getting infected, is anything you said true, or are you just routinely off by a few orders of magnitude when quoting figures, as well as prone to making up stories that have little basis in fact?