This disgusts me completely.
In-game advertising is only acceptable in real world environments e.g. in soccer games where the teams and stadiums have the correct sponsors and adverts or at least real world equivalents. However, in Battlefield 2142, where we have no idea what the future will behod, the prospect of adverts is silly and banal.
However, I'd rather have adverts that spyware anyday of the week. PC gaming in general is going down the shitter. EA aren't the only culprits here; even respected developers/publishers such as Valve are guilty of fucking up their games with excessive software. Half-Life 2 ought to have been banned for the way it treated its consumers - having to authorise the game with an online registration before you could even play it. This proved useless anyway, since cracks were available within days of its release. In fact had it not gone and treated its customers like filth, people probably wouldn't have reacted the way they did e.g. decide to boycott it or pirate it out of spite. In turn, Valve probably lost more money than it would have if it didn't have any anti-piracy measures at all.
And don't get me started on that Starforce crap or whatever it was that fucked up people's hardware.
In general, it is very hard to stop publishers pushing their shitty malware and other useless, harmful software upon us, mainly because those of us that are 'in the know' about such practices (read: malpractices) are in the vast minority; this isn't going to stop Billy Bunsen-Burner and his mates from buying the games and unwittingly installing malware. Hell, if you told them BF2142 had spyware, they'd probably think 'Wow! James Bond is in this game! Let's buy lol lol lol'.
I don't understand why EA keep doing this to us; they haven't released a decent game in years (the only good games I can recall at this point that EA have released in the last 5 or so years, The Sims 2 and the Battlefield game, were not even developed by them but by respected developers they bought out and then made shitty with their ridiculous 'Who cares if the game is a piece of crap/not even finished/a poor console port? Release it 6 months ahead of schedule' policies) and yet are richer than Rich Tea; you'd think they'd realise by now, 'Hey! We own most of the games industry now! Lets actually take some time over our games instead of slapping licences all over half-finished games!' but no, if anything, they're greedier and more insatiable for money than ever.
Unfortunately, Governments are too busy whining about Bully and making ludicrous claims that you, and I paraphrase, 'Score points for reenacting Columbine' during the course of the game to care that publishers are taking consumers to the cleaners and running riot all over consumer welfare.
The fact that politicians still claim that in controversial games players 'score points' (not including sports games where the idea is to earn more points than your opponent) is proof that they are completely out of touch. The last game I played where you 'scored points' for anything was Sonic on the Sega Mega Drive.