Adobe
| Basic information | |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1982 |
| Type | Public |
| Industry | Software |
| Official website | https://adobe.com/ |
Adobe is a software company based in America, specializing in software for creative applications, such as video editing, photo manipulation, animation, or illustration.
Consumer impact summary[edit | edit source]
Adobe switched to subscription software, abandoning perpetual licenses in favor of the Creative Cloud model of monthly ongoing payments. This has made limited availability of current software to users without a subscription.
Adobe has also been accused of using user information to train artificial intelligence, mandatory cloud syncing in applications such as Adobe Fresco and Adobe Scan without a choice to opt out, and without end-to-end encryption. Adobe has also been accused of monitoring the reading behavior of readers within eBooks, collecting information in rich detail without encryption, and employing dark patterns to restore unwanted features on updates.
Besides that, Adobe has experienced multiple data breaches that exposed millions of users' personal and payment information.
Incidents[edit | edit source]
Transition to subscription based software[edit | edit source]
Adobe initially distributed their software with perpetual licenses, where the user would only pay once for the right to own and use a copy of an application (or, through Adobe's Creative Suite, a collection of applications). In 2011, Adobe introduced Creative Cloud, a service that gave users access to all of Adobe's current software for a monthly fee; Creative Cloud eventually superseded Creative Suite and all of Adobe's perpetual licenses, and as of today, the only way to access up-to-date Adobe software officially is through Creative Cloud.
Alleged use of user data for AI training[edit | edit source]
User documents forced into the cloud with no opt-out[edit | edit source]
Some of Adobe's iPad applications, including but not limited to digital painting app Adobe Fresco and document scanning app Adobe Scan, require an account and do not offer any option to opt out of syncing all documents created in these apps with Adobe's cloud servers. Similarly, the new non-Classic versions of Lightroom are fundamentally built around uploading all images to Adobe's cloud.
There is no end-to-end encryption, i.e. Adobe has full access to all these files. Disabling internet access makes it possible to work offline, but any files created in the affected apps immediately sync to the cloud in the background as soon as the device is connected to a network again.
As an American company, Adobe is subject to the United States Cloud Act, which requires all US companies to grant the US government access to any user data even if stored on servers outside their jurisdiction and comply with requests to help with spy operations upon request.
Spying on users' eBook reading activities[edit | edit source]
In 2014, it was revealed that the popular Adobe Editions eBook reading app reported extensive information about users' reading habits back to Adobe. This included several unique identifiers, which books were added to the app, when which one was opened for how long, percentage read, and page navigation information.[1]
Moreover, all this information was transmitted completely unencrypted in plain text. This meant that even someone who was just on the same Starbucks WiFi would have been able track their reading activities in realtime, entirely undetected.
Disrespect for user choices[edit | edit source]
Adobe is known for using a dark pattern where certain options are re-enabled during or after each update despite the user explicitly disabling them before. The same choice is presented with the desired setting as a default many times in the hope that the user will either give up or accidentally forget to uncheck the option.
Instances of this were the options to automatically install updates in the future in the Adobe Flash installer. The same dark pattern is currently used in the Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop app, which presents the same option on each update and requires the user to disable it manually every single time if they do not wish to relinquish control to Adobe over when updates happen.
Whether this is to be attributed to stupidity or malice is debatable, as for instance Adobe Lightroom Classic also has a habit of resetting the language to the system language after every update instead of what was manually chosen in preferences, and the Windows version of Adobe Illustrator has for a period that spans multiple different centuries required the user to manually maximize the application window and re-enable the document rulers after each startup until the issue was finally addressed when the application was moved to a different GUI framework.
User information leaks and data breaches[edit | edit source]
In 2013, credit card information and personal data of 38 million customers was exposed in a data breach.[2]
In 2019, Adobe left about 7.5 million Creative Cloud customer records in a database publicly accessible online in gross negligence. The database was not even protected with a password.[3]
Products[edit | edit source]
- Creative Cloud (20xx):
- Photoshop (199x):
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ Gallagher, Sean (8 Oct 2014). "Adobe's e-book reader sends your reading logs back to Adobe—in plain text". ArsTechnica. Retrieved 16 Mar 2025.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ Patel, Maaz (26 Mar 2023). "The Adobe Attack of 2013: A Cautionary Tale of Cybersecurity Failure". Medium. Retrieved 16 Mar 2025.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ Cimpanu, Catalin (26 Oct 2019). "Adobe left 7.5 million Creative Cloud user records exposed online". [ZDNet]. Retrieved 16 Mar 2025.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
- Wikipedia contributors (2025-02-03). "Adobe Inc". Wikipedia. Retrieved 2025-02-06.
- Rossmann, Louis (2024-06-07). "Adobe roofies all of their customers". YouTube. Retrieved 2025-01-15.