Adobe New Terms & Conditions
 

If you are a professional, if you are under NDA with your clients, if you are a creative, a lawyer, a doctor or anyone who works with proprietary files - it is time to cancel Adobe, delete all the apps and programs. Adobe can not be trusted.

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THIS is pure offensive insanity. Adobe is claiming royalty-free rights to copy and make new content out of customers' assets. Adobe is claiming that they can then sub-license customer assets to OTHER companies. They describe a "reasonable" use-case, but describe no limitations.

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What do they mean by 'your content'?

If they mean any document I happen to have converted to pdf using their software then that's outrageous.

If they provide some sort of document hosting service and they referring to content which I've uploaded to it then sadly that seems to be the norm for free cloud hosting services?

"Free" ??? You mean the users don't pay

but the providers have to make money somehow -- so they sell your details or your data

I think you've misinterpreted it. The licence is "solely for the purposes of operating or improving services" and the ability to sublicense is under that purpose, i.e. there is a limitation.

Any online service needs a licence to copy otherwise they can't copy onto their servers. They will also need to cover subcontractors somehow, e.g. if Adobe host on Amazon they need to allow Amazon to copy too.

You could argue that the "improving services" part is a bit cheeky.

These terms are quite common, you'll note that pprune has:

Adobe professional products are solely cloud based and it is a subscription; apparently cloud storage is part of the subscription. Regardless of what weasel words there are they appear to be planning on running 100% of everyone's work through analysis software. Recall that image used to sell sunscreen with the dog pulling a girl's swimsuit to the side? I expect that Adobe filter software will generate a child porn accusation for anything similar and lock all your work from being retrieved.

As Louis Rossmann pointed out there is no option to decline the license and download/remove all your content from their servers. Either you grant them 100% access or you are locked out.

There is a bunch of thrashing over at https://www.reddit.com/r/Adobe/

Now I'm wondering if I should dig out the old Photoshop 5 disks and see if if can be loaded.

Best reason ever to store everything locally. Remember the definition of “cloud” …

”someone else’s computer”

We all have a choice - we either use the standard products and suffer whatever the suppliers want to do or we lock ourselves away and use safe kit and software that doesn't allow us to communicate with 99% of other users.

Your choice

The Adobe CC suite is incorporating AI functionality at every opportunity. I suspect that this new provision in the licence is, in part at least, to use users' material for 'training' and improving the AI functions in its services and software. Not suggesting I agree with it (or not), but I suppose one could argue that at least they're telling you they're doing it!

It would seem that by the the end of 2024/early 2025 most of the well known companies will have AI integrated to varying extents. To me that suggests that the Ai needs to see what is inside the file, rather than just the file shell name. It could be super helpful to some, but for others it's a blatant violation of their rightful privacy. In the Adobe case it seems that the users have been given no choice to migrate and delete their content before agreeing to the new updated terms and conditions, which seems to be perfectly suited to alienating both paying and non-paying customers. I read a few weeks/months back how Microsofts new latest AI was taking screenshots every 3 seconds thus negating any privacy the user might expect.

There is now an Adobe response.

It's still somewhat evasive, particularly over what "improving" means. They claim not to be training AI, but applying the trained models. And yes, they are scanning for beastiality porn.

And, since I'm replying anyway, might as well address this one, which is the IT equivalent of saying "A British Airways 777 is just somebody else's aeroplane".

It's somebody else's computer. Which is engineered to a different spec. Running somebody else's software. Kept in a secure building with multiple redundant power and network connections. With security guards. With a full time support staff. And with a R&D budget greater than the GDP of some countries.

For those uninclined to give Adobe their hard-earned in perputuity Serif are currently running a 50% off sale on their well regarded Affinity Designer (Illustrator), Photo (Photoshop) and Publisher (InDesign). £80 gets you all three forever and you can have them individually if you want.

No connection etc.

Thanks for that Abrahn, just been bemoaning how much I miss Creative Suite but I'd be happy to spend £80 on a package like that...

Well, I bit the bullet and bought the Affinity suite! Six years since I used CS6, think I might be a bit rusty on how these things work...

Adobe products are not solely cloud based, they run locally and content can be stored locally.