Here's another source about the violation of law.

Regarding quality assurance... we test every update on dozens of configurations. Nice that you know how long that takes.

Regarding your WMP question - if WMP sends data back to Microsoft, that's not the same as WMP sending data to some advertising company.

And yes, it seems fairly obvious that I don't like Apple. All the Macs in my private collection (Color Classic, LC III, 6100), my private iMac, they're all there because I hate them. Sure. I'm so glad that you know me.

A few words to other readers before I close this topic: when we research software that seems to be legitimate, but has some parts that could be classified as spyware or similar, we usually try to find out whether the company did that on purpose, or if the bad part was kind of a mistake (sometimes it's between those two, of course). The first case is simple, in the second case, we try to communicate with the creators of that software to improve it and restore it's usability.
And the later case is what has happened here. We informed our users without breaking the software, because we were calculating that Apple would react and make it unnecessary - and they did. At the same time, while it would have been exagerated to remove iTunes (when we where sure Apple would do something), we needed to warn our users. And in the end this warning helped, because it made Apple aware of the feelings of many users.

You said it was a question of trust. Well, I say: if we had said nothing, people would trust us less because they would aay we would have just been afraid of the big company Apple. If we had removed everything, people would have lost trust because thanks to Apples quick move that would have been exagerated. So even from the trust level, the "compromise" was perfect.

So imho this was the best that could be done - no permanent harm done either to Apple by removing their whole application, nor to us because we hadn't warned our users. We'll keep you updated...