Re: Thanks for spamming me Microsoft
Nigel, I agree absolutely that truly vital updates should never be confused with other junk, such as advertising.
However, I disagree with your point about auto-updates. Most of these scare-mongering vulnerabilities are not that likely to bite you in a week. If you're behind a decent firewall, have scripts turned off in your browser, and avoid opening unknown email attachments, you're already 99.9% safe. That other 0.1% can be deferred.
The downside of auto-updates is exactly what we're seeing in this thread. You've given an outside agent, with a very poor record of trustworthiness, blanket permission to do anything it likes to your system. If that's not the definition of a security vulnerability, I don't know what is.