Adobe

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Adobe

Basic information
Founded	1982
Legal structure	Public
Industry	Software
Official website	https://adobe.com/

Adobe is a software company based in San Jose, California that specializes in creative software such as photo editing, video editing, animation, illustration, web development, and more. Founded in 1982, the company developed the Portable Document Format (PDF) in 1992 as well as a full suite of creative software. Due to the widespread usage of their products used by industry professionals and novices alike, Adobe dominates the creative software industry^{[citation needed]}.

Consumer impact summary

Lack of ownership

Adobe has switched from a perpetual license model to a subscription model (Creative Cloud).

Proprietary file formats

Works created in Adobe software come in Adobe-exclusive file formats such as .psd for Photoshop and .indd for InDesign.

Data breaches

Besides that, Adobe has undergone multiple data breaches which have exposed millions of users' personal and payment information.

Incidents

Transition to subscription based software

Read More: Adobe Lightroom: Perpetual to Subscription Transition, Adobe Subscription, Adobe CS Activation and Adobe Sued by FTC Over Hidden Fees in Subscription Plans

Adobe initially distributed their software with perpetual licenses, where the user would pay only once for the ownership and access to a copy of an application (or, through Adobe's Creative Suite, a collection of applications). In 2011, Adobe introduced Creative Cloud, a service which allowed users to access an individual application or multiple applications for a monthly or yearly fee. In 2013, Adobe announced it would discontinue Creative Suite.

As of today, the only way to legally access up-to-date versions of many of Adobe’s applications is through Creative Cloud. Moreover, many of the activation servers for perpetual licenses of prior versions of these applications have been shut down, meaning that even with a legitimate copy of the software and a serial number, the software cannot be activated.

Creative Cloud offers monthly (with options to be billed either monthly or annually) or prepaid annual plans, as well as plans for individual applications and bundles containing multiple applications. These subscriptions can cost, for many of the individual applications, $22.99/month or $263.88 prepaid annually, and for Creative Cloud Pro (which includes 22 applications and some additional extras including 100gb of cloud storage), $69.99/month or $779.88 prepaid annually.

For annually billed monthly subscriptions, there is also a cancellation fee after 14 days which charges the user 50% of the remaining balance of the contract (e.g., if the user cancels within the 7th month of an annually billed monthly subscription, the user will still have to pay 50% of the fee for the remaining 5 months, which, in the case of a $69.99 plan, for instance, would cost the user $174.98).  As for prepaid annual plans, they offer no refund or cancelation whatsoever after 14 days.

Alleged use of user data for AI training

Read more: Adobe's AI policy and Adobe Firefly

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; monitoring the reading behavior of users within eBooks; and employing dark patterns to re-enable, when an application is updated, features which a user has disabled.

User documents forced into the cloud with no opt-out

Some of Adobe's iPad applications, including, but not limited to, the digital painting application Adobe Fresco and the document scanning application Adobe Scan, require an account to access and do not offer any option to opt out of syncing all documents created in these applications 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 of 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

In 2014, it was revealed that Adobe Digital Editions, Adobe’s e-book reading application, reported extensive information about users' reading habits back to Adobe. This included several unique identifiers; which e-books were added to the application; when which one was opened, and for how long; percentage read; and page navigation information.

Moreover, all of this information was transmitted completely unencrypted in plain text. This meant that even someone who was on the same public Wi-Fi would have been able track their reading activities in realtime, entirely undetected.

Disrespect for user choices

Adobe uses a dark pattern where settings which a user has disabled are re-enabled during or after each update. 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.

For instance, this happened with the option to automatically install updates in the Adobe Flash installer. The same dark pattern is currently used in the Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop application, 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 had, for a very long time, 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

In 2013, credit card information and personal data of 38 million users was exposed in a data breach.

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.

Products

Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe's previous line of creative software has been joined into a wider ecosystem called the Adobe Creative Cloud. The Creative Cloud includes updated versions of the previously purchasable software:

• Photoshop
• Lightroom
• InDesign
• After Effects
• Dreamweaver
• Illustrator
• XD
• and many more

Included with the Creative Cloud, depending on plan options, Adobe also offers cloud based storage, typefaces, and stock photos and other stock files.

References

• 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.