SAN FRANCISCO – A Silicon Valley startup says it’s shutting down operations and shifting to a new business model after it was blamed earlier this year for turning unwitting computer users into targets for annoying web ads – and hackers.
Facing lawsuits and an industry crackdown, Superfish co-founder Adi Pinhas said he wants to find new uses for the company’s powerful “visual search” software, which can recognize a picture and search for similar images without relying on text labels.
Pinhas said he’s closing Superfish and is promoting the technology through a new company, JustVisual, that’s building smartphone apps consumers can use to identify plants or shop for clothes and furniture.
READ MORE: Lenovo acknowledges Superfish security concerns; offers tool to remove software
“This was a change that was already in the works,” Pinhas told The Associated Press Thursday. But he said it was accelerated by a firestorm that erupted three months ago when researchers found a worrisome security flaw in Superfish software that came pre-installed on some laptop computers sold by Lenovo.
The program used Superfish’s visual algorithms to identify objects people viewed online and show them ads for similar products. Lenovo said it thought consumers would find that useful, but critics called it intrusive and annoying. What’s worse, experts said it used code that severely compromised the encryption used by websites to protect passwords or account numbers that shoppers provide when making an online purchase.
The discovery prompted consumer lawsuits against Superfish and Lenovo, which scrambled to remove the software. Pinhas wouldn’t comment on the still-pending lawsuits.
READ MORE: Lenovo hit with lawsuit over malicious Superfish adware
Superfish was also rocked by a recent crackdown on so-called “ad-injection” companies that insert or replace ads on popular websites, sometimes without the site owner’s knowledge. A report from Google this month identified Superfish as a participant in that industry, although Pinhas said Superfish software was used by other companies in ways that were difficult to control.
“It just got way too complicated,” he said. “We don’t believe any more that this is the best way to bring visual search to users.”
The new JustVisual company promises to be upfront about showing ads. Chief Product Officer Kevin Lee said shoppers interested in a particular item can take a picture with their smartphone and then use an app to find ads for similar items on sale. It has four apps and is developing others.
The company, which is based in Palo Alto, California, also hopes to make money from licensing its software, which experts have praised for its tech prowess. As an example, Lee said companies might use it to protect commercial trademarks by searching for counterfeit “knock-offs” on e-commerce sites.
JustVisual will follow industry standards for security and privacy, Lee said.
Lenovo admits it ‘made a huge mistake’ with Superfish
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On Thursday, Lenovo CEO Gerry Smith admitted the company “made a huge mistake” with Superfish while speaking at Lenovo’s first Tech World conference in Beijing. According to reports, Smith said moving forward the company would not to pre-install any for of adware, or hidden software.
“We clearly made a mistake, and we’re not going to make it again,” Smith said. “We’re going to be extremely transparent on what the usage model is, and hyper-sensitive that data is secure and not misappropriated.”
At the time Lenovo said Superfish was pre-installed on some consumer laptops shipped in a “short window” between October and December 2014.
However, users on a Lenovo customer forum thread first mentioned the seeing the software in June of last year. Other reports suggested Lenovo had been pre-installing the adware on models manufactured over the last two years.
– With files from Global News’ Nicole Bogart
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