Tech Shout!

Software giant Microsoft’s woes just never seem to end. Now, a Beijing university student has sued Microsoft for infringing upon his privacy. Lu Feng claims that a utility used by the company to verify that customers are not running bootleg copies of its software, violated his privacy.

Lu Feng a Peking University student said that he installed Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage software, after he received prompts from the Windows XP operating system on his laptop.

He later understood that the installed program enabled Microsoft to gather information about his computer and himself, rather than just checking whether or not the installed Windows XP system was genuine.

Thus, in the suit, Feng claims that Windows Genuine Advantage collects information about people’s computer use as well as their personal data without any sort of authorization.

Lu Feng filed the lawsuit against Microsoft this week itself in the First Intermediate People’s Court of Beijing.

According to a report on the case by the government-run China Internet Information Center, Feng claims that Microsoft “could gather the computer information and personal information of the plaintiff through executing this program on a regular basis and sending it back to Microsoft Corporation online.”

“Lu Feng thought that this program posed a great threat to the information safety of his computer and his privacy and prevented users from exercising their property rights toward their computers,” the report said.

Lu Feng is asking the court to order Microsoft to create a tool that would allow him to delete the WGA notification program. Not only that; Feng wants Microsoft to apologize to him in a national newspaper advertisement, besides paying him $88.28 USD as compensation.

A Microsoft spokeswoman in China told Xinhua news agency that the company “is fully committed to letting customers control their personal information.”

Interestingly, a while ago, Microsoft had agreed that WGA is not very perfect, and that the program has falsely reported that millions of users were running counterfeit fake versions of Windows. Currently, the software giant is facing a class action lawsuit in the US filed by plaintiffs who claim that WGA violates their privacy.

But, when contacted for a statement on this particular issue regarding Lu Feng, Microsoft refused to comment.