I'm actually not the one who made that comment. My mention of spyware was in reference to the Ask toolbar installed by the JRE on Windows. Installing such things is not a normal part of the Ubuntu update process.
I've mentioned elsewhere ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8285065 ) that I really don't mind Java, and FWIW I have liked the Jetbrains IDEs, but the consumer JRE installation and update process is really quite bothersome.
