yes Bill I saw the same thing and what was annoying I saw another article criticising the use of ads for other programs yet right at the end ti shoved in a PC Tune up program LOL!!

From what I can see, all these PUPs are optional. Too many people just click right on through and don't read the fine print.

I agree it is ridiculous for antivirus vendors to do this.

But to be fair, people need to read. The difference here is they do not do deceptive button clicking or graying out options to uncheck there stuff. It is a simple uncheckmark.

But pups need to die.

As long as I have the option to NOT install the bundled PUPs it's not so bad. I'd rather they weren't there but it's hard to blame someone giving you free software not to try to make some money from it. Unfortunately, it's made all too easy to simply click thru the install and wind up with the PUPs. Less savvy users get the worst of it.

Some people like the extra 'search' providers. I know it sounds hard to believe, but I've come across some that don't want to remove those added 'features', so they won't follow my advice.

Unwanted PUPS. I don't know if anyone else has noticed this or not.

Recently I have noticed a spot ad on my TV channels, for free candy crush and some similar games. That is all the ad mentions, "FREE". Well I knew this had to be a come on so I checked it out. During the install I was presented with boxes to check to turn down various installs. There probably was at least a half dozen. OK, I unchecked all boxes. Guess what it went right ahead and installed them all. I am savvy enough that I ran malware software (different ones) until I got rid of all of them. This, I don't think is fair to the uninitiated user. They would be stuck with all of that garbage.

Unchecky
Good antivirus program
Reading things carefully

Those three things are all you need to stay protected against PUPs.

Yes well I find if I have missed some by mistake or they have crept in without me knowing (happens a quite a bit) most are picked up by SuperAntiSpyware runs which I do fairly regularly