Is Adobe Accessing Your Private Data? [u]

[Update June 23, 2024. Earlier this month, anger and distrust reigned as Adobe’s Terms of Use were discovered to be far more intrusive than most of us expected. Adobe reacted to the outrage by revising and clarifying their Terms of Use. Here are the highlights, along with a link.

1. Adobe does not own your content in any way.
2. All content stored on local devices cannot be monitored by Adobe.
3. All content stored on Adobe cloud services is licensed to Adobe for purposes of providing their services and meeting legal requirements, but you still own it.
4. Adobe does not use your content for training generative AI, unless you upload it to Adobe Stock.

Here’s the link to their revised Terms of Use. Note that Adobe now provides summaries of what the legal language means. Make a special point to check out sections 2.2 and 4.

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(The following was written June 8, 2024.)

Last week, news broke of a change to Adobe’s Terms and Conditions for all Creative Cloud applications. These Terms can not be bypassed – you either accept them or you can’t use any Creative Cloud apps.

First reported by a security blogger on Tuesday, I read it about last Thursday in this AppleInsider article.

NOTE: You can also read about it here in this FastCompany article

The key points are:

• “…The update to section 2.2, ‘Our Access to Your Content,’ includes verbiage that Adobe ‘may access, view, or listen to your Content through both automated and manual methods, but only in limited ways, and only as permitted by law.'”
• “…The Content, outlined in section 4.1, includes ‘any text, information, communication, or material, such as audio files, video files, electronic documents, or images, that you upload, import into, embed for use by, or create using the Services and Software.'”
• “…Section 4.2 states that users grant a ‘non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the Content.'”

As you can imagine, giving Adobe unlimited permission to do anything they want with your files, media or projects scared a lot of people due to its perceived overwhelming invasiveness.

Another big concern is preventing your creative work from training AI systems without your permission or compensation. This behavior reminds me of the typical Silicon Valley mindset of “break the rules now, ask forgiveness later.” All too often, later never comes.

Lawsuits alleging creative theft are already in progress against ChatGPT, MidJourney, and Stability. And Meta is a privacy-invasion case study all on its own.

As the firestorm continued to grow, Adobe remained silent for three days, then issued the following statement, as reported in AppleInsider.

“Adobe accesses user content for a number of reasons, including the ability to deliver some of our most innovative cloud-based features, such as Photoshop Neural Filters and Remove Background in Adobe Express, as well as to take action against prohibited content,” the company said at the time. “Adobe does not access, view or listen to content that is stored locally on any user’s device.”

While helpful, this didn’t clear up the confusion – especially regarding how to protect projects covered by NDA statements or whether a user’s creative content is training AI.

24 hours later, Adobe released another statement, making the following points:

• Access is needed for Adobe applications and services to perform the functions they are designed and used for (such as opening and editing files for the user or creating thumbnails or a preview for sharing).
• Access is needed to deliver some of our most innovative cloud-based features such as Photoshop Neural Filters, Liquid Mode or Remove Background.
• For content processed or stored on Adobe servers, Adobe may use technologies and other processes, including escalation for manual (human) review, to screen for certain types of illegal content (such as child sexual abuse material), or other abusive content or behavior.

WHAT I DID

I sent an email to my contacts at Adobe on Thursday night asking:

• What is Adobe’s purpose in changing the Terms of Service?
• How can users opt out of granting this permission?
• How can creatives continue to use Adobe products while assuring themselves that Adobe won’t spy upon, access, or otherwise view projects that are under NDA?

So far I haven’t had a response. I’ll update this article if I do.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO

Personally, I believe that any projects created and stored locally on your system are not accessible to Adobe. So any projects that you need to keep private MUST be stored locally. This also means that any collaborative projects or libraries must be stored on local servers, not cloud servers.

However, you should also assume that any libraries, files, media or projects stored in the Creative Cloud – or, really, any Cloud service – are not private and will be shared with people you don’t know for purposes that are never revealed. This includes training AI models with your data.

At this point, we are waiting for Adobe to clarify what exactly they are doing with our data and what we can do – if anything – to prevent it.

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