Adobe: Difference between revisions

{{ToneWarning}}{{InfoboxCompany

| Name = Adobe

| Founded = 1982

| Industry = Software

| Official Website = https://adobe.com/

 

[[wikipedia:Adobe_Inc.|'''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. Wide spread adoption of their products by novices, industry professionals, and nations states has enabled Adobe to carve out a significant market share in the creative software industry. In FY24, Adobe's Digital Media Segment reported $15.86B in revenue to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). <ref>[https://www.adobe.com/cc-shared/assets/investor-relations/pdfs/adbe-2024-annual-report.pdf ANNUAL REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934] </ref>   

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

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

In 2013, Adobe disclosed a data breach effecting approximately 3 million customers. This number was later revised upward, to approximately 38 million. <ref>{{Cite web |last=Finkle |first=Jim |date=29 Oct 2013 |title=Adobe data breach more extensive than previously disclosed |url=https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/adobe-data-breach-more-extensive-than-previously-disclosed-idUSBRE99S1DJ |website=reuters.com/}}</ref> This event would result in a $1,000,000 dollar settlement and the promise of new security policies. <ref>{{Cite web |date=15 Nov 2016 |title=Adobe to Pay $1 Million, Update Security Policies to Resolve Multistate Investigation Into Data Breach |url=https://www.mass.gov/news/adobe-to-pay-1-million-update-security-policies-to-resolve-multistate-investigation-into-data-breach |website=mass.gov}}</ref> In 2019, Adobe's Elasticsearch database was discovered insecure by researchers, resulting in the potential exposure of approximately 7.5 million users information. <ref>{{Cite web |last=Khandelwal |first=Swati |date=26 Oct 2019 |title=Unsecured Adobe Server Exposes Data for 7.5 Million Creative Cloud Users |url=https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/adobe-database-leaked.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com}}</ref> Breaches impacting federal agencies in the U.S.A and Adobe Commerce/Magneto stores occurred in 2023 and 2024, respectively. <ref>{{Cite web |date=5 Dec 2023 |title=Threat Actors Exploit Adobe ColdFusion CVE-2023-26360 for Initial Access to Government Servers |url=https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa23-339a |website=cisa.gov}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last=Sansec Forensics Team |date=1 Oct 2024 |title=Thousands of Adobe Commerce stores hacked in competing CosmicSting campaigns |url=https://sansec.io/research/cosmicsting-fallout |website=sansec.io}}</ref>

===Transition to subscription based software===

{{Hatnote|Read More: [[Adobe Lightroom: Perpetual to Subscription Transition]], [[Adobe Subscription]], [[Adobe CS Activation]] and

 

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.

{{Hatnote|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 pattern|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.

All of this information was transmitted completely unencrypted in plain text. This meant that even someone else who was on the same public Wi-Fi as another user would have been able track their reading activities in real time, entirely undetected.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Gallagher |first=Sean |date=8 Oct 2014 |title=Adobe’s e-book reader sends your reading logs back to Adobe—in plain text |url=https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/adobes-e-book-reader-sends-your-reading-logs-back-to-adobe-in-plain-text/ |url-status=live |access-date=16 Mar 2025 |website=[[ArsTechnica]]}}</ref>

===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.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Patel |first=Maaz |date=26 Mar 2023 |title=The Adobe Attack of 2013: A Cautionary Tale of Cybersecurity Failure |url=https://medium.com/@maazptl240602/the-adobe-attack-of-2013-a-cautionary-tale-of-cybersecurity-failure-1ef4ec74eb64 |url-status=live |access-date=16 Mar 2025 |website=[[Medium]]}}</ref>

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.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Cimpanu |first=Catalin |date=26 Oct 2019 |title=Adobe left 7.5 million Creative Cloud user records exposed online |url=https://www.zdnet.com/article/adobe-left-7-5-million-creative-cloud-user-records-exposed-online/ |url-status=live |access-date=16 Mar 2025 |website=[ZDNet]}}</ref>

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:

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

*{{cite web |author=((Wikipedia contributors)) |date=2025-02-03 |title=Adobe Inc. |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Adobe_Inc.&oldid=1273676016 |access-date=2025-02-06 |website=Wikipedia}}

*{{cite web |last=Rossmann |first=Louis |title=Adobe roofies all of their customers |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXxMCm941WA |date=2024-06-07 |website=YouTube |access-date=2025-01-15}}