Microsoft has been hit with a second lawsuit over Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), its antipiracy program that checks if the Windows operating system on a machine has a valid license. The class-action suit was filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Seattle, just four days after the first one. The new suit lists its plaintiff as Engineered Process Controls and Univex, along with citizens Edward Misfud, David DiDomizio, and Martin Sifuentes, who are listed as owners of licensed copies of Windows XP running WGA.
The suit alleges WGA is spyware and that Microsoft mislead consumers by labeling it as a critical security update. The plaintiffs maintain Microsoft did not make users aware that WGA frequently contacted its central servers. "WGA gathers data that can easily identify individual PCs, and WGA can be modified remotely to collect additional information at Microsoft"s initiation," according to the filing.