In reply to mark k..

OK, I've been using Linux for 15 years so I didn't even think of permissions as an issue here. Since you need to explicitly disable auto-updates I assumed people doing so were familiar with good permission setting too.

Personally I've never had a single issue with auto-updates, even 4.7.1, so I'm pretty comfortable with letting them apply automatically. If anything goes wrong I'm usually able to step in within a few hours to fix whatever's broken.