Have you ever installed a program you downloaded and found that you unknowingly gave the installer permission to install other programs or change your home page and search defaults? It has happened to me before. I like to call these "piggybacking" programs. Companies have made it increasingly difficult to find the check-boxes you need to click on in order to avoid these installations.
The latest thing has been to offer the option of a "Standard Installation" or a "Custom Installation". The standard installation will install the extra programs, and you only see the check boxes that stop the installation after you have chosen to do a custom installation. If you never choose custom installation, you never realize that you are giving permission for these programs to be loaded on your computer.
These programs used to just be annoying, but now they are becoming malicious. I recently downloaded one program to try, and I found out that a company that produces adware was going to be installing its software alongside this program. (I chose not to install the original program I downloaded, either.)
Fortunately, there is a program that helps clear these check boxes: Unchecky. Unchecky will work in the background and automatically uncheck most of these boxes for you. Unchecky does a good job, but it is not perfect, and it does not replace watching the installation process yourself. However, it will work as a great sidekick to help defeat annoying and malicious piggybacking software.
No comments:
Post a Comment