Sunday, March 1, 2015

Why Superfish Should NOT Have Impacted Businesses

The Twittersphere has been a blaze with privacy concerns stemming from Superfish and Privdog.  What I find most interesting is the amount of users running hardware supplied from their employer that were hit with this.  From a consumer standpoint, using a OEM computer with the OOBE setup and bloatware is the pretty standard trade off of privacy and adware for convenience and usability.  I'm a consumer, and yes, I use the images "as-is" for my family's hardware platforms when it comes to laptops.
If you've ever looked at the driver/software installation order from the OEM sites, the argument keep the system as built is compelling.  However, as your typical consumer of business hardware, I'd expect that the OEM built is not provided.  In the last 15 years, I've allowed a build of the OS and software to be outside of my control only a handful of times, and this latest offense strengthens my position to rebuild and reinstall the OS and applications personally or at least to understand what's been installed and configured.  Yes, this is a pain, but if I don't know what is installed what's been configured with some level of scrutiny, how can I trust it?  Using an OEM build and handing it your employees "as-is", as is the case with Superfish, shows an obscene lack of due diligence and respect and if you're in charge of an IT department tasked with deployments and hit with Superfish, fire who ever you're paying to do "Image Development" and rebuild your program; You're doing it wrong.


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