OpenCandy

Some may consider OpenCandy an adware. In principle it is. It is a way to recover software development costs using advertisement.

On the other hand, OpenCandy does not demonstrate the negative characteristics commonly associated with adware:

• Advertisement is only shown as a one step of software installation. Once software (WinSCP) is installed, you do not receive any more advertisements.
• No unwanted software is installed. User has to explicitly choose to install promoted software to actually receive it.
• No private information are collected. Installation program collects only information necessary to choose relevant advertisement, such as geo-location, operating system and language. Note that this is about the same amount of information, any web page you visit receives from your web browser. Collected data is sent to opencandy.winscp.net. It also downloads advertisement image from media.opencandy.com (though it does not send any information there).

For details see OpenCandy privacy policy.

Yes you can. Use /NOCANDY parameter when starting installation program.

You can also use portable executable, thus avoiding installation program with OpenCandy.

Below it an example of OpenCandy recommendation screen in WinSCP installation program. Use the Install … button (or similar) to choose to install the recommended application. Use the Do not install … button (or similar) to continue installing WinSCP without installing the recommended application.