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Neowin Guide: Avoiding Adware in Installers

This week we have selected a guide from our Selection of Essential Guides posted by Xinok.

This guide provides several real examples of installers which contain adware. The intent is to show you the tricks that they use to attempt to trick you into installing the adware in hopes that you can learn to avoid it.

Before you brush off this guide as common sense, it may be worth a look. The adware developers are getting very sneaky and I've almost been caught a few times myself. Recently, Foxit Reader modified their installer so that the adware was no longer optional but mandatory. This is a continuing trend and adware is only going to get worse, so it's important to learn how to avoid installing it... unless you like toolbars which track your browsing history.

Note: All of the installers have [#] in their titlebar because they were running in Sandboxie.

Accept or Decline? Agree or Disagree?
This is a common trick that they'll use. To avoid installing the adware, you must click Decline / Disagree rather than Accept / Agree.

This may catch some users because it looks like a license agreement.

Read the rest of the review in our forums.

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