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Hiding Your Choices And Saying You Made Them

Posted by timothy on from the lowest-underbelly-of-the-lowest-snake dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Lawmeme's Paul Szynol describes how during installation RealPlayer hides checkboxes that elect that the user receives spam, making it look like the user chose to make the selections when in fact he probably just didn't see the options. "This is essentially a cheap and dirty marketing tactic which creates an illusion of informed acceptance by the user where no such acceptance really exists." Other people have posted similar examples from other applications. Is this illegal, or just annoying?"

4 of 484 comments (clear)

  1. Implied Consent by Flounder · · Score: 4, Funny
    IANAL, but I'm sure somewhere in the EULA, they've written themselves a loophole.

    BTW, isn't it ironic that the acronym for I Am Not A Lawyer is I Anal??

    --

    No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova

  2. They deserve it! by xmuskrat · · Score: 4, Funny

    Getting spam is almost as bad as... using RealPlayer. At least they are consistant.

    --
    activestudios web design
  3. Re:Simple solution... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Thanks you insensitive clod. My email address is a@b.com, and I have always wondered why I get all this junk mail from Real!

  4. Yet another reason... by morganjharvey · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is just another reason why I don't use RealPlayer -- I decode my streams by hand. I have the help of fourteen trained cats, and as the stream is "played' accross a readerboard in front of us we all translate it into .au format.
    A central server compares all the files in realtime and averages them to compensate for any typing errors/drunkennes.
    It's a surprisingly efficient system. Right now I'm listening to the White House's response to the leopard inspectors in Iraq who just found a forbidden stash of Gucci pants in an Iraqi bunker.
    I'm eager to upgrade to a 28-cat system, thus effectively doubling my sample rate and allowing me to listen to stereo feeds and possibly even allow video by... er.... damn, I gotta get a life...