Microsoft installed an app in users’ system trays advertising
the free upgrade to Windows 10.
Not satisfied, the company eventually made Windows 10 a
recommended update so users receiving critical security updates
were now also downloading an entirely new operating system onto
their machines without their knowledge.
This is essentially equivalent to saying: You've been running whatever version of Windows, but we'll trick you into installing Windows 10. Specifically, when prompted with a Windows 10 update, if the
user chose to decline it by hitting the ‘X’ in the upper right
hand corner, Microsoft interpreted that as consent to download
Windows 10.
The previous trick didn't work on all of you, so we'll go on to change the default behavior of our dialog boxes in order to trick you into installing Windows 10. By default, Windows 10 sends an unprecedented amount of usage
data back to Microsoft, and the company claims most of it is to
“personalize” the software by feeding it to the OS assistant
called Cortana.
And while users can opt-out of some of these settings, it is
not a guarantee that your computer will stop talking to
Microsoft’s servers.
This probably explains it all.--
Microsoft appears to have learnt a lot from LinkedIn [0].