Adobe angers Chrome users by bundling browser plugin with security update

I'm not saying the permission request isn't overbroad, but "manage downloads" seems potentially reasonable. I'd imagine that some permission along those lines would be required for a PDF viewer to start displaying a document before it is completely downloaded.

Now I don't know that that is what they were using it for, whether they could have made a narrower permission request, and so on, but permissions are permissions because we want to permit them some of the time. I think it is counterproductive to dismiss requests before evaluating them. That's the kind of behavior that leads to kitchen-sink permission requests from the start (when users are most motivated to try something) because a developer doesn't trust that they'll get a reasonable targeted request tomorrow.

Does anyone know if they collect data for everything you do or just when you open a PDF file?

Chrome, to its credit, doesn't automatically load extensions that are installed this way. (Or at least it shouldn't; I've seen enough malicious Chrome extensions in my tech support years that I suspect there's a way to bypass this prompt.) That doesn't excuse the practice though; no software update should install additional features without the user's consent, and this is a practice that seems to be all too common in the industry.

The problem is how do you distinguish plugins installed through the browser versus not: at the end of the day, this falls into the typical DRM problem of how do you enforce restrictions (in this case, what can install plugins).

The direction browsers are all taking is requiring them to be signed by the browser vendor, effectively making them gatekeepers (and you can't have a preference to disable it, because if you did you could just install a plugin by disabling the preference (i.e., edit the config file) and then install the plugin normally). That really sucks too, sadly.

The scary things that happen when as a company, "hey, it's not like our users could possibly hate us more!" is true...and you're doing well financially for long periods of time.

My recollection is that this behavior in the Java updater actually pre-dates Oracle's acquisition of Sun. I think at one time it was for a different toolbar ('Ask!' maybe)... but it's not new by any means.

Having said that, of course just because Sun may have started the practice doesn't mean Oracle gets a pass for merely continuing it.... unless there was some long, long terms sort of contractual things: which I highly doubt.

Don't worry, Yahoo! (Altaba?) probably won't be pushing the toolbar for much longer :)

Yup. There was a huge internal commotion about this on our employee only general mailing list. The person who reported it was very shrewd, reporting the behavior as an open ended performance question. Employees in the Bay Area inmediately hated it. A VP had to step in and stop the discussion because it was happening in spite of our collective objection.

they still do it

It still happens.

They "suggest" by default to try out Macafee and Intel True Store (not sure about the name).

That's an interesting question. There was a good thread here on exactly that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11806739) a while back.

It was a Backchannel story about an "adtech" company in Philly: "The Perks Are Great. Just Don’t Ask Us What We Do."

Basically, a surprisingly large number of employees don't know or don't care about the ethics of what a small number of leaders in their company do. Others justify such actions to themselves in convoluted ways. Only a small number truly can't deal with it.

The management was probably given a bonus for expanding their mobile presence five-fold between 2015 and 2016 :)

Perhaps they can be persuaded if enough people report it as abuse. There's an option to do that when you remove extensions.

Yeah, but only about 5% of users are going to benefit from such a feature.