By doing it automatically, Nokia are also signing up people to MyNokia that are not legally permitted to be signed up to the service...

From the MyNokia FAQ:
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Question 7: Can I join My Nokia if I am under 13?

Answer: You need to be of a certain age limit (which differs from country to country) to register for "My Nokia". The following are the age limits for the respective countries:

* Australia - 13 years old
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There's no age check on the automatic sign-up.

From the MyNokia Terms of Service:
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Eligibility for the Service(s) No person under the age of 18 or who otherwise is a minor under his/her local legislation (even if 18 or older) is eligible to use and/or register as a User of the Service(s). In the event that you are of the age of 18 but still a minor in your country, you will need to obtain consent from your parent(s) or other legal guardian(s) for using and/or registering as a User of the Service(s).
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There are no checks at all to verify whether it is actually "legal" for the owner of the N900 to be signed up to their service.

I got the N900 on the weekend, applied the update before installing any other software, and immediately received an SMS back from Nokia. Until I saw this thread, I didn't realise that they'd SENT an SMS from MY phone at MY cost to automatically sign me up for the MyNokia service. I was never presented with a prompt, notification or option for whether I wanted this additional "free" service.

I've since confirmed that I have been billed for the SMS that was auto-sent to Nokia, and I'm not at all happy about it - more about the principle than actual cost. If they send one SMS from MY phone at MY cost, how many others will they send? A new one with each update? A "touch bases" one each month? How will I know when the SMS is not listed? How can I trust that I won't get a phone bill one month with tons of SMS's sent from my phone that I didn't authorize or send myself?

Given a choice, I may well have signed up to MyNokia via their website (at no cost to me) after reading terms/etc and deciding whether I wanted to be notified of updates via SMS (the package manager can notify me - I don't really need SMS notifications!). I would never have sent them an SMS to subscribe. I have never previously subscribed to anything by SMS, and will never willingly subscribe to anything via SMS.

The decision made by Nokia to auto-subscribe N900 owners via a user-paid SMS stinks. It's a clear violation of privacy, a denial of consumer rights (being silently auto-subscribed at a cost to the user to an optional service while providing NO ability to refuse the subscription before the user is charged), and for some of the users being subscribed it's downright illegal to have subscribed them at all - even according to Nokia's own EULA.