Q. How did Superfish even get onto Lenovo machines in the first place?
A. The original motivation for this was that the product team was being
asked, "Can we do something to improve our consumer experience?" Someone had
the idea to improve their shopping experience in a novel way — not to own
their experience, but just, if the consumer is looking at a desk, can we
suggest an alternative product that looks like that desk? The motivation was
to enhance the experience.
This is some amazing bullshit: nothing like ads on my computer to 'improve my experience'. And if this is all about improving my experience, why is Lenovo getting paid by the adware vendor? It's pretty damn annoying the interviewer didn't push on this at all.
Not only that, but if that piece of fantastical bullshit is actually way worse if taken at face value.
"Obviously, in retrospect, if we had known what that meant in terms of how it was implemented, we would have never done it."
So they decided that the one thing their customers were missing from their experience was a targeted ad system, and they decided to implement that without doing any research into the company ?! They just went ahead and stuck a comprehensive spyware system into their laptops and did so without any knowledge of how it would work? There is no way that can be spun into a better version of events than "we're greedy assholes". That is pretending you weren't malicious by claiming you run a business like a bunch of high schoolers
