The following was posted earlier today on our forums (you can access that thread here).
I wanted to be sure our full community could see this, so I’m reposting here as well.
“We understand the concerns that have been raised about our partner offer with Epic Scale. Amid user feedback, on Friday mid-day we paused the offer to allow time for us to do an evaluation.
This offer has been made to Windows client installs only, not Mac or Linux machines. It was released to about 6% of our global population between mid-January and March 6th 2015. If you are looking for information on how to remove Epic Scale conventionally or manually, please visit https://www.epicscale.com/how-to-uninstall-epic-scale
There have been a lot of claims over the past few days, some of them fair and some pretty wild. We have always invited an open and constructive dialogue, particularly through our forums, and want that to continue.
As we’ve discussed in the past, partner offers are one of the ways we generate revenue. Many of you already understand that this is a common model for software companies that provide products and technology for free. Our policy is that these offers are strictly optional and we have never done a silent install; in fact, we built our installer technology to make silent installs impossible. The offers we choose and how we present them are something we strive to get right, and we think we’ve been mostly successful over the last four years.
That being said – from the feedback we’ve received, it is clear that we misjudged how users would react to this offer; this software is truly different from our previous offers and therefore deserves special attention. For this, we unequivocally apologize to our affected users.
A quick word on Epic Scale. We do believe their charitable mission to be genuine and heartfelt, and their technology innovative. We encourage you to learn more about them and to offer constructive feedback so they can improve on what they are doing. We are working with them to take another close look at how their software works (and how we present it) and have shared the concerns that have been made here so that they can be addressed.
We hope this better clarifies the nature of our offers, and of our partnership with Epic Scale.”