Late To The Party, Adobe Users Finally Upset About The Terms of Use

An Artist Finally Noticed Adobe Scrapes Their Cloud

This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone familiar with Adobe, but apparently a lot of Photoshop users have been living in blissful ignorance.  Many years ago, Adobe realized they could make more money turning their products into a subscription service.  They turned their products into the Creative Cloud so they could charge users every month instead of letting them buy the programs outright for a one time fee.  Along with that change came cloud storage for your files and brand new terms and services.

The more technically inclined took a look at those terms and immediately realized that users had to agree to give Adobe permission to scan anything uploaded to that cloud storage.  It seems that message did not get spread widely enough, as an artist recently realized what Adobe is doing and has raised a public outcry.  The reason they noticed it was that Adobe slightly changed the wording of that section of the terms of use; they didn’t change the original policy but did make it clear enough that more people noticed.

If you don’t want to read through the article at The Register, the short version is that as long as their access doesn’t technically break the law, which it won’t in most cases, Adobe is free to scan your cloud hosted art and use it for their own purposes, such as to train their AI.  You can, at least for now, disable content analysis from within the program to give yourself some protection but that is unlikely to remain an option for personal users for long.