Re: Why do people install these things?
Yep, it's a trade-off that I am *explicitly* giving permission to do. I'm a manic control-freak on my systems, and any external system I get my grubbies on. IOW a bastard engineer from hell :). Farther down, someone points out that users are trained to implicitly give permission when they just click through all the pup-up requesters/windows. And that's where the whole thing is wrong.
For instance, I spent most of a day uninstalling "trial" internet security packages off one system. It wasn't hard since I was doing other stuff, but four of these were installed, all live-scanning, and it'd take hours just to get to the desktop. After I zeroed them and installed a real, licensed, security package, I went through and updated all the software. There were a hell of a lot of them that wanted to put all those packages back on, and the user would likely click on through.
Can't fault the users. And it ain't all to blame on the browser developers. Conditioning at its worst.