Of course you're right that Lenovo never should have put those on any of their machines, but my impression is that ThinkPads and the consumer line are run by very different groups within Lenovo.
https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/superfish
https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/lse_bios_n...
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2984889/windows-pcs/len...
https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/ht102023
> As of September 2015: Lenovo systems may include software components that communicate with servers on the internet - All ThinkCentre, All ThinkStation, All ThinkPad
I suspect that if a company really wanted to hide something they probably could. So unless you install windows or another OS on it yourself, you don't know what the manufacturer put on it.
I guess it would not be too hard to find in general if it shows up in the list of processes, but they could make it quite obscure and hard to find.
But yeah, I agree that this is quite an annoying move from Lenovo. The least they could do is make it opt-in instead of on by default.
Yes, but "not sure if it has spyware preinstalled" is much better than "sure it has spyware preinstalled".
I guess I could argue that the former is actually worse. If you know spyware is installed, you can opt to remove it. If you are not aware of the existance of spyware on the system, and it happens to have spyware, you are more vulnerable.
You could of course take the risk and assume that it does not have spyware, and maybe you're right and everything is fine, but you can not _know_ that it is fine.
The rest of your comment disingenuously assumes that a computer can only have one piece of spyware, and if you know what it is you can remove it and now you're safe. What if there's more spyware you don't know about? And if your remover is completely safe, why not just run it on all your computers, safe or not?
Not to mention that removing spyware from a computer turns it into a computer that might or might not have spyware.