Lenovo Group Ltd. said it will no longer pre-install advertising software on its PCs, a week after the world's biggest computer maker apologized for including adware on consumer laptops that exposed users to hacking.
"Our goal is clear: To become the leader in providing cleaner, safer PCs," the Beijing-based company said in an e- mailed statement Friday.
Factory-installed software on Lenovo PCs in the future will include only the operating system, security products, Lenovo applications and related software needed to make the hardware operate properly, the company said.
"This should eliminate what our industry calls 'adware' and 'bloatware,'" Lenovo said.
On Feb. 20, Lenovo apologized to customers for pre- installing software that potentially exposed them to hacking attacks and unauthorized activity monitoring. The biggest maker of personal computers said at that time that it was a mistake to have the software, made by a company called Superfish, included on Lenovo's machines.
The company was criticized by cyber-security specialists for Superfish's ability to monitor Web behavior and suggest advertisements based on images that a user might be viewing. The technology used by Superfish breaks the encryption between Web browsers and banking, e-commerce and other sites that handle sensitive information, potentially exposing machines to hacking.
-- Bloomberg News