Hi Robert,
For security reasons this is disabled.
But, since you deploy the changes from staging to live, you could simply enable the auto updates on the staging domain, but not the live site. The activation has not other effect, but to access the auto update tokens. I am guessing during the deployment you copy all database data + files over to live, so if the plugin is updated on the dev, then deployed, it gets also updated on live as well – so having it enabled on live is unnecessary.