These guys have absolutely zero awareness of sensitive privacy issues. The trample on their customers rights, secretly and obviously maliciously, and they do it over and over again!

I can think of no reasonable response but to abandon Lenovo products entirely.

And go where?

UPDATE: I've made a huge mistake. seduced by the matte black dark side. Avoid all modern Intel CPU/chipsets (post 2006) if you value your privacy and security:

In summary, the Intel Management Engine and its applications are a backdoor with total access to and control over the rest of the PC. The ME is a threat to freedom, security, and privacy, and the libreboot project strongly recommends avoiding it entirely. Since recent versions of it can't be removed, this means avoiding all recent generations of Intel hardware.

http://libreboot.org/faq/#intel

Original comment follows:

Former Thinkpad fan. I love my new Dell Rugged Extreme. I got the 12. This thing is built the way Thinkpads used to be (complete with the price tag of a used car).

The only thing(s) I don't like about it is the missing trackpoint. I really miss that. And the fact that black-box UEFI is built in (but what do we know about modern microcode anyway, might as well get some ostensible security measures for 'free'). Oh, one more: the "QD" connectors do not accept standard straps/slings -- only insanely expensive (and hard to find) Dell brand straps/handles.

Everything else about it is outstanding. This thing is a brick with rounded, rubber edges.

Drive over it with your truck. (watch the video)

Use it as body armor. (no, don't really)

Go scuba diving in the arctic. (Check out the frozen-in-an-ice-block video on Youtube.. while running on battery.)

The screen is incredibly bright, but it also has a slick quick-kill for all the lights. Just the thing for when a warlord is on your tail. The multi-color LED backlit keyboard looks awesome.

It runs Kali Linux (built on Debian Jessie) perfectly. Everything works, including the touch screen and stylus, out of the box.

UEFI isn't any more black-box than BIOS in general. Sure, I'd rather run entirely FOSS firmware, but in the absence of that, UEFI doesn't make things any worse. If anything, it allows quite a bit more introspection and extensibility. And its core is FOSS (https://github.com/tianocore/edk2), just not the versions shipped by board/system vendors.