Sure, you can opt out, sort of....
Downloading and installing are two different things. I don’t mind having the 7 gig download waiting for me. I can still dump it.
It's not just home users, the idiots are hitting rural businesses as well with this. TELCO's are not going to upgrade every time the dorks at MS R&D have a new idea demanding faster systems with higher capacity. They could care less. AT&T the largest carrier isn't going to upgrade any of their grid unless it either fails or it is a new service area where residence or business wasn't there before.
Those who can't get cable or DSL which is still a very large chunk of the user market are stuck with limited usage of 10GB and lower a month to make it affordable. What part of that can MS not understand? There is no plans in the works that I know of to substantially upgrade and make High Speed Internet available to everyone where low usage Caps will not be used. What is out there now is it for the next decade or more.
Next is the corporations and websites. Convenient online banking they say. Yeah even up to a few months ago with my bank till the Geek who manages the site put in so much HTML it now times out. So that means hoping in the truck and driving to 3G or 4G service area or a walk up the ridge just to check a bank balance with a Tablet I would not even own except it was free with my phone. Convenient for who?
Someone is going to have to slow down. I'm not buying anything else with MS software. I've had it. XP took me just one evening to get comfortable with. W-8 took at least two months of hide and go seek with files and programs that should have been easy and fast to locate. I started outed out on W/98 so I knew where too look but MS moved it. Stopping the OS from phoning home every time I updated something took time to figure out as well and that has changed itself a time or two. Gee I wonder why? ET phone home command in an update perhaps?. All of this is for Data mining. In that respect MS has become worse than Google.
I've just hid the Icon for their wretched W/10 Free Upgrade nonsense so it doesn't accidentally get clicked on. MS doesn't listen nor do they learn from their past mistakes. For the frustration I can get frustration free from Linux and MS Corp best start understanding they keep on crapping on customers and that's where they will go. Even hiring a tech to install A Linux OS would be worth the bucks just to get out from under corp MS in future upgrades.
Sure, you can opt out, sort of....
Further, once downloaded, the customer can choose WHEN to install it, or at the flip of a switch change their mind and NOT install it AND stop being nagged to install it.
All of this is clearly documented, why people ignore the fact that their machine will only download Windows 10 if they CHOOSE to?
Sheesh.
Isn’t Microsoft the Iroquois word for Nanny State Command And Control?
No “$Windows.~BT” file anywhere on any of my 36 machines. Yet.