Yes, celebrity rockers dropping their album into someone's iTunes account unbidden is kind of creepy and just another form of muzak in a world where getting away from unwanted music has started to feel like a blessed relief.
On the other hand did so many people really need to complain to Apple about it that they actually had to make a widget to make them feel less annoyed?
Listening to the news reports it seems that the English are genuinely more upset by U2 giving them a record than they were about Snowden's revelations regarding metadata monitoring. Is the sorry spectacle of rich old men in leather trousers making terrible music and giving it away for free really that bit more heinous than the creeping erosion of civil liberties? Apparently so.