In reply to David McCan.

They can and kinda do, (which is why in another comment here I called it a very mild issue if an issue at all, but guess tavern has rules against critisising their titles and tht comment was zapped lol). Theme forest has a plugin that enables you to auto update from there and theme shop do similar thing.

Now the difference is, that till this day it was all "pull" and sometimes required extra effort while this feature is "push". To have this kind feature you need some personal information on the user that other players just didn't imagine they should ask for.

I can see themeforest imitating such a feature, same with plugin that sell extensions.... maybe even some debugging facility dropped in to ease support.

But I do hope no one will actually go for the remote install option as it is just insecure to have such a feature, as any automattic employee can now install whatever he wants on their server. The themes probably are not even tested to work with old PHP versions or funny server setups.

It is just one (big?) step into the "you think it is your blog, but it actually belongs to automattic" future jetpack tries to bring upon us.