Well, this is disturbing.
Really, really disturbing.
Photoshop is SPYING on you now.
This is nuts. @Photoshop has new terms that require you allow them to view everything you create, and reserves the right to deactivate your @Adobe software if you make stuff they don’t like. Of course they say “for legal purposes” but we all know… pic.twitter.com/LsZejsE77u
— Grummz (@Grummz) June 5, 2024
Adobe is spying on everything you do with their software, and if you want to use their products you are agreeing to have everything monitored.
2.2 Our Access to Your Content. We may access, view, or listen to your Content (defined in section 4.1 (Content) below) through both automated and manual methods, but only in limited ways, and only as permitted by law. For example, in order to provide the Services and Software, we may need to access, view, or listen to your Content to (A) respond to Feedback or support requests; (B) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security, legal, or technical issues; and (C) enforce the Terms, as further set forth in Section 4.1 below. Our automated systems may analyze your Content and Creative Cloud Customer Fonts (defined in section 3.10 (Creative Cloud Customer Fonts) below) using techniques such as machine learning in order to improve our Services and Software and the user experience. Information on how Adobe uses machine learning can be found here: http://www.adobe.com/go/machine_learning.
How nice.
I should say that my wife and I have a subscription to Adobe’s products–all of them in the Creative Cloud, in fact–and I am a regular user of Lightroom to edit my photographs.
Nothing we do is in the least embarrassing or controversial, but I have to say that I don’t like this one little bit. And, if my photographs were less anodyne, I would like it even less.
What I or anyone else does with Photoshop or other Adobe apps should be no concern of theirs, but we live in a digital world where it takes extraordinary effort to maintain even a modicum of privacy. Your ISP can monitor everything you do on the internet, Google searches your emails to enhance their advertising (and God knows what else), and no doubt the government has keyword searches to monitor what everybody does across the net.
What you do gets sold by data brokers, and we now know that the government buys that information from data brokers as a backdoor way to get around Fourth Amendment protections.
You are being watched.
No doubt many people think, “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, why worry?” That is exactly the wrong way to think about it. The entire rationale behind the Fourth Amendment is that unless the government has good reason to suspect that you HAVE done something wrong then what you do is none of their business.
Here is Canada’s Attorney General declaring he needs the power to stop *anticipated crime*.
How? He wants judges to be able to order some who’ve not broken the law confined to their home or ankle-braceleted on suspicion that they *might* break the law https://t.co/dNJxEgk1LP
— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) June 6, 2024
In Canada they are developing “precrime” laws, designed to punish people before they possibly commit crimes. Here in the United States the government uses third parties to impose what amounts to prior restraint, keeping you from sharing ideas and information that the government wants suppressed.
They call it “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and “malinformation.” Shut up, prole.
If you believe that a company that monitors everything you do with their software and analyzes it for their own purposes isn’t going to share that with the government or others under certain circumstances, you are naive. If you don’t think any nudes or embarrassing photos or videos will get perused by employees of Adobe or others, you are beyond naive.
And, if Adobe can do this with its own products, what else is it doing?
Microsoft has a feature in Windows 11 that keeps a screenshot of everything you do. It is all kept in unencrypted form on your computer. Every image, every keystroke, saved for posterity, or the NSA, FBI, or whomever.
They call it “Recall.” I call it dystopian.
I have tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of images stored in my Adobe database. All the edits are tied to Lightroom.
Thanks Adobe. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy knowing that your company ransacks my computer for your own purposes.
Will I switch away from Adobe? I’ll have to see whether I can bring my edits over to a new application, and then consider whether I want to learn an entirely new workflow.
Either way, Adobe has pissed me off, and I won’t be recommending it to anybody who asks. If you are a new user then go somewhere else.
Jerks.
