It is wrong to frame this as people not liking auto-updates. That is not the issue. The issue is FORCED auto-updates. Or even just obfuscating how to turn off updates.

I've always said that if your updates are such a benefit, then surely users would almost never even need to turn them off without a good reason, so why not give them the option? Most of the time this happens, it is because a company is doing it to maintain their platform, at the expense of their users.

Don't say it is just for safety. Why is it easier to install an outdated kernel than an outdated web browser?

Operating systems and toolchains are FRAGILE. If I have a computer doing anything important, I have to be vigilant about keeping rolling images of it. Updates break things all the time, if you are doing more than just the basics.

I travel a lot. Sometimes I have to reschedule a flight from a 2G cellular connection and can't share that bandwidth with updates. I have computers that run proprietary CNC machines, use specialized musical hardware, or need to have ancient toolchains to build highly specialized software (like J2ME and other embedded toolchains) for internal use for some of my clients. This self serving evergreen mentality is filled with contradictions. Like that I can't use an insecure version of SSL to fix a SCADA device on a secured closed network because they would be insecure, but nobody has a problem with me using telnet or HTTP, without any warnings whatsoever.

It's my computer, I don't have to justify why I want to say no to updates! We should not even be having this conversation about why it is not ok for Google or Microsoft to make permanent changes to my data when I have said no.

Yes, I probably should make more backups, and I have had to become way more careful about that. But the response to a lot of botched updates is just to blame users for trusting them and not making backups. I shouldn't have to worry about data loss or loss of functionality from updates -- it used to be unheard of for updates to not to have built in rollback functionality.

And don't get me started on Google. They are the worst offender. And what bothers me even more, is that they lie about why they are doing it. They've treated their users as unwilling beta testers for years. They installed a persistent menu bar widget without my consent on my mac, which you could either hide, or disable using obscure undiscovered flags.[1]

It is only because I got fed up and made Chrome.app immutable and completely removed and locked their Keystone updater, that my Mac wasn't rendered unbootable by Google's recent involuntary update.[2]

This should tell you everything you need to know. They have such hubris that not just are they modifying their users's computers, but they are making it nearly impossible for the average users to say no.

If companies were truly being honest and stood behind their updates, then there would be a clearly labeled and discoverable checkbox to disable updates, like what OSX has. I'm fine with putting that checkbox behind a bunch of scary warnings, and having the OS check back to make sure you really want to keep updates disabled. But what Google and Microsoft are doing with updates is blatantly dishonest and immoral.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/26eorb/chrome_notifica...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21064663