Hiding Your Choices And Saying You Made Them

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?"

Comments

Probably falls into same field as minimum textsize

[TibbonZero]

While I don't know the laws on minimum text size, I am sure that a company cannot make you sign something in .001pt Times New Roman. This is probably very illegal for them to do, and they will probably get away with it...

No kidding

[kableh]

This has always bugged me about Real Player. Their newest player installs a lame little executable, that isn't easy to get rid of, that starts up their little message center in the system tray. It was bad enough with their old version which loaded RealPlayer every time you booted, but at least you could turn it off.

These days, if it is encoded in Real it isn't worth my time to watch. I make sure everyone I know is aware of this too.

Already knew that.

[da3dAlus]

I noticed that quite a while back when I installed RealPlayer. I say it's annoying just because I have to remember to disable those checkboxes. I also say it's gotta hurt them, because it makes me place my feelings about Real (the company) at a very low level. I don't think it's illegal, and I know they're out to make money like everyone else. However, I say don't screw over your customers, and they'll come back. Piss them off, and you will certainly regret it later. And yes, I know the RealPlayer I download is the free version, and I'm not technically a customer, but if they pull that stuff with me on the free products, I can only imaging the "features" they'll put in the big version I pay for. Again, my opinion of them is quite low because of their tactics.