Yes, people could choose not to download it, but chances are many won’t pay attention to what the updater is telling them it is installing, and just confirm it to get back to what they were doing – or they already had a previous version installed that they had tried and thought why not let it update, regardless of whether it will actually be used. This is the muddy waters, since making an announcement about numbers downloaded automatically leads a reader to believe all these people are actually going to *use* the software.

Any company that uses a similar tactic should be brought to task as well – this is not an attack against Apple even though they may have a history of this sort of thing – since it is being deceiving and not providing the whole story.