I'm ok with them doing so if it is something like this where it was just a "help" or tutorial. BUT to be sure I would appreciate the heads up. I use GoDaddy and I never had this come onto my dashboard. The problem I have here is if this just popped up on my dashboard my first response would likely not be GoDaddy, but likely wordpress and that makes finding the culprit a very unpleasant process that leads to hard feelings and frustration on behalf of more than 1 or 2 parties..

I would say that this is nothing new and if you follow what the wordpress generation of users tend to believe in politically, it's kind of hypocritical to complain a whole lot. I mean GoDaddy or any other host deciding what is best for your server needs, isn't much different than, say, the government telling you what insurance plans are best for you, or EPA regulations, etc, etc, are best for you and the rest of the world because they think you are to stupid to make any choices on your own.

I am not a fan of implementing this stuff without telling people. Why not just ask people to be part of a test group, may be give them a special discount coupon (especially when GoDaddy specifically, has pulled a lot of coupons for renewals), or only put it on new installations. On the part of hosts that did this I will say something in their defense. A lot of people putting together sites are not people that have 2-4 years of college/technical school experience in web design (especially us older folks). What a lot of younger people today consider easy and straight forward with wordpress, may not be the case for the rest of us, and to some may be down right perplexing. So when the digitally challenged run into issues it is often hard to find answers because a lot of tutorials etc have steps that experienced users consider common knowledge so they omit them. When that happens a lot of people end up contacting not only wordpress forums but also hosting companies. So if they installed a "walk through/tutorial," It is likely they are just trying to free up customer service inquiry wait periods by eliminating some questions that should be directed at other 3rd parties. In this case it was a mistake and likely did just the opposite. Hopefully lesson learned.