"Search Protect" program by Conduit installed mysteriously with 3.3.1

[tyciol]

Today I finally (after learning some sites I like approve of the new version) agreed to install this new version of uTorrent.

Suddenly, and I haven't installed anything else, there's a program called "Search Protect" running on my computer.

Suddenly my search engine on Chrome is hijacked from being Google to being Conduit, and any time 'new tab' it shows the Conduit page (copyright on bottom) utilizing a Bing bar on the top instead of Google.

This kept on happening even though I clearly changed it to google both for my engine and homepage.

Now my firewall is warning me of this SP program trying to access the internet independently and send data.

What is going on here, uTorrent? I never consented to install either Bing or Conduit. At least when you were bundling Ask.com in the past you asked permission. Now it seems like you don't want our permission to install this?

I'm having a lot of difficulty trying to shut down and remove this spyware and do not appreciate being tricked into installing it. If you did include any reference to it in your update, I didn't see it, so you did not make an adequate effort to inform your users of this 'feature' as you did in the past.

It is especially insidious that you are encouraging us to auto-update. At least you still make it possible to disable that. I barely trust you guys now to inform us of what is in updates, much less trust you to make responsible auto-updates without review.

Edit: for the moment, I managed to Ctrl-Alt-Del to manually shut down the processes because left or right clicking on SearchProtect didn't allow any options to shut it down. It appears there is something about this program which forces us to go to the Conduit search engine page instead of the one we specify in our browser settings.

Never have I seen such a misleading name. It 'protects' our search engine by keeping it Conduit in spite of what we change it to.

That'd be nice I guess to protect against malware that might change our search engine or browser settings, but not if it is changing it to a company I have never heard of or consented to have as my undisputable homepage.

I can't uninstall the programs now, keeps saying it's busy, so I just deleted as many of the files as I could find under Program Files and might try the rest on a restart.

[Akarius]

Same here...and I'm not very happy about it.

Browser hijack and some crap PUP.Optional.Conduit.A also pops from Malwarebytes.

[ciaobaby]

Pay attention and READ the dialogues during installation and it will NOT be installed.

[tyciol]

I wasn't installing, I was updating. There may be options not to install that thing when installing it fresh, but I don't recall any options not to install it during updating. Was a pain to remove.

[Jonius7]

This is the same for me, today I installed v3.3. I found out I had 2 different versions of utorrent in my add or remove programs list so I decided to uninstall and download the latest version. I took care to untick all the options to the increasing amount of 'spam' software that was coming bundled with utorrent. And yet I still find this search protect installed. This is very annoying, utorrent used to be very simple.

[ciaobaby]

I took care to untick all the options

Did you also select "[ ] custom" install and "Decline" the offer of the 'useful' tool?