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

humm?

[NWT]

RealPlayer, because you really really checked that checkbox. really!!

What is he complaining about?

[HomerG]

I recently converted my single boot Linux laptop to a dual boot Linux/Windows XP laptop, so that I can use Microsoft Office (writing law school papers is still easier in Word than it is in Open Office).

He has already accepted the EULA for XP and MS Office so he has surrendered all his rights to Microsoft, why is he concerned about a little spam? This sounds pretty damn silly to me. He finds it ok to give MS complete access to all the data on his laptop, to do with whatever they see fit, but it is an outrage that he might be sent some easily filtered spam.