Gregg Keizer reports:
A federal judge has killed class-action allegations in a lawsuit that accused Microsoft of misleading consumers when it fed them anti-piracy software under the auspices of a critical security update, according to court documents.
The move means that Microsoft will not be faced with millions in potential damages. Last fall, Microsoft’s lawyers argued that a class-action lawsuit could involve “tens of millions” of customers who might be owed “hundreds of millions of dollars” if the company lost the case.
A class-action would have let virtually anyone who owned a Windows XP PC in mid-2006 to join the case without having to hire an attorney.
[…]
The three-and-a-half-year-old lawsuit claims Microsoft duped customers by labeling its Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) software a critical security update, failed to tell them that WGA collected information from their PCs, then frequently “phoned home” that data to Microsoft’s servers.
Read more on Computerworld.