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This is a genuinely scary scenario.

Have there been precedents of profiteering by hiding _something_ invisible to the end-user but with an ulterior purpose into normal consumer electronics?

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Lenovo's Superfish? Prior to that, the Sony rootkit CDs? Pre-installed adware in general? Amazon's thing with the always-on microphone? The Samsung TVs that report all filenames on connected devices back to a server?

I miss the good old days of "If you aren't paying for a product, you are the product." Now, the new paradigm is: "By using our stuff, we own your data. All of it."

How do Global Fortune 500 companies think bundling malware is OK still after all the bad press the last few years?

Because that bad press isn't translating into lost dollars. And dollars are the only language large companies understand.

Superfish only got bad press because their spyware was shotty and had huge attack vectors.

Half of Silicon Valley is either built on spying on people or selling to those who are spying on people. It's the original sin of social networking.

All malware, spyware, and adware.

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