[PhantomGremlin]

kind of hard to see how they do product updates without them...

It's very easy to see how they do product updates without them. Simply have the user do "software update ..." at his convenience.

What you meant to say is it's kind of hard to see how they FORCE product updates without them.

[raesene9]

For non-technical users, it seems pretty likely that a product without automatic updates, users won't update frequently.

This results in users getting compromised... a lot... that's why pretty much every heavily used piece of consumer software now does automatic updates, from Apple, to Google to Microsoft.

Decrying automatic updates as "zero privacy" seems a bit daft in that context.