That, and they paid money to surreptitiously bundle it with other software. Chrome is notorious for suddenly being mysteriously installed on relatives' computers: https://imgur.com/NIZk9Pd
And advertising something on your own property sure sounds reasonable, but I think it's a slightly different story when "your own property" is "the de facto homepage of the internet". That's what I meant by "abusing monopoly position".
"Complete your antivirus" has a pre-checked tickbox for a totally irrelevant product. And in the process agreeing to a license. That's pretty dark.
Maybe as someone with above-average technical ability this looks obvious to you. To a lot of people, it isn't. And this pattern is aimed at fooling the less technically literate.
yes it is, dark patterns refer to user-design decissions that arguably exploit human-weaknesses. In this case human-attention span (not noticing that you have to disable this option), lazyness(it costs effor to opt-out) and human confidence in authority (I trust avast with my AV, so I trust avast not to exploit my trust (but they do)).
And advertising something on your own property sure sounds reasonable, but I think it's a slightly different story when "your own property" is "the de facto homepage of the internet". That's what I meant by "abusing monopoly position".