A man awaiting trial for selling illegally modified firearms and for possessing bomb making equipment is suing Microsoft because its software did not delete his pornography browsing history.
Michael Alan Crooker has filed a suit in the Massachusetts Supreme Court, according to Information Week, which claims $200,000 in damages from Microsoft because the company failed to keep his private data secure.
Crooker said that when he bought his computer in 2002 he was told it would keep his information secure, and he set browser Internet Explorer to delete his browsing history after five days.
In 2004 the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms confiscated his computer, which was sent for analysis to forensic computing experts at the FBI. That analysis revealed sexually explicit videos of Crooker and his girlfriend and cached pornographic internet pages.
Crooker's suit says that Microsoft claimed that it would keep his data secure and did not. Its failures, he says, have caused him great embarrassment and he is now seeking the $200,000 in compensatory and punitive damages.
According to court documents cited by the story, Crooker said he has already reached settlements with Hewlett-Packard, which made the Compaq computer that was seized, and Circuit City, which sold him the machine at a Massachusetts store two years earlier.
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