Flash player update results in unintended McAfee with NO OPTION TO OMIT

[Linwood Ferguson]

I am a long term Adobe user, and creative cloud subscriber.  I am used to Adobe products at times offering to install other unrelated items, generally bloatware that are useless, or commercial tie-ins.  No big deal, the install scripts allow you to omit it.  Shame on you for making it default to include, but no big deal.

However, this morning I got a popup "update flash", clicked on it, and with NO DIALOG WHATSOEVER the exe that it downloaded began and completed installing software from McAfee.

Again NO DIALOG TO CHOOSE TO OMIT IT.

That, to me is entirely unacceptable.  I am posting this note to warn others of this apparent change in policy, and to suggest to Adobe that this is unethical.

Since McAfee is known in its corporate products for installing products that cannot be easily removed, now I have to wonder if un-installing from the control panel was complete.  Or what else McAfee has left behind.

I still think one should opt in instead of opting out -- but even opt out is better than just shoving software down our throats without an option to say no.

Shame on you Adobe.  Shame.

[jeromiec83223024]

Thanks for the feedback.  Providing Flash Player free of charge is a tremendously expensive undertaking, and the bundled offers are an important cost-recovery mechanism.  That said, under normal circumstances, you should have seen an option to opt out of the bundled offer. 

I've included a screenshot of the expected UI below.  We've heard from some users that running third-party plug-ins like Ghostery interfere with the correct execution of the software on the page, which results in the UI for this middle column not being displayed. 

If you're not using something like Ghostery or AdBlock Pro, and you were not presented with this dialog, I'd be more than happy to investigate the issue further and try to get it resolved.  If you could give me some basic details as described in the following article, that would be very helpful in attempting to recreate the problem: Read Before Posting: How To Get A Useful Answer To Your Question

[jweisgram]

I've just posted some of this elsewhere. I do want to get my experience in front of someone at Adobe.

Flash presented itself on my Win 7 system saying I needed an update. I elected to take the update.

I was then prompted to download a file, which I did. My browser saved the download link as

http://aihdownload.adobe.com/bin/live/install_flashplayer15x32au_mssa_aaa_aih.exe.

I saved the file to disk and it was scanned by Norton and judged to be safe. I then launched the .exe file and it proceeded to install Flash and McAfee.

No option to decline was offered. I consider that to be unacceptable.

Through this process, I wasn't interacting directly with my default web browser of Firefox, I only saw Firefox as being involved at the end of the install, showing me some other Adobe product. I can imagine that the Adobe install used my browser to do the download but I didn't see that in action.

Note I do run Noscript in Firefox, which blocks unapproved Javascript from running. Normally if I encounter web/Javascript content I am given the option to allow it to run but that didn't happen here.