Lenovo Hotkeys updates itself, breaks hotkeys until new app is opened, then wants telemetry.

Today, my hotkeys on my Thinkbook 15 ITL Gen2 stopped working.

There was no obvious reason why. I typed “hotkey” into the search and opened the Lenovo Hotkeys app, and then a box came up, checked by default, asking if I wanted to send usage reports back to Lenovo. So I unchecked the box, and clicked Continue, and my hotkeys work again.

I find it extremely annoying how issues like this are so common on Lenovo laptops. How everything is cobbled together so quickly and with so little care that weird issues come up and all you need to do is check their forums to see that many of them affect other users as well.

Aside from that, here’s another marginally important app that, really, only controls four buttons, and it’s morphed into spyware by default. Are the reports to Lenovo going to be limited to how you use those four buttons, and nothing else? Something makes me doubt they’d bother if that were the case.

I feel like there’s a lesson here, but I’m not going to be the one to explain further.