Artists got an unpleasant surprise when they opened Photoshop this week, as they were shown a pop-up window asking them to agree to new terms of service. Among the changes: Adobe now says it has the right to access customers’ content through “automated or manual methods.”
Now it’s true that when we use cloud services, we sacrifice a certain amount of privacy. And it’s not unusual for social networks, for example, to claim similar rights — when you share your photos on Facebook, you’re also giving Facebook the right to use those photos. But we’re not talking about your personal Facebook or Instagram photos; Photoshop is used by many, many professional artists for their livelihoods. They might also be working on sensitive or confidential material.
The moment you upload your data to some company cloud you no longer have control over it. They can use however the want it.
Officially they say it’s to comply with law and that they’re not using that data to train AI.
That kind of panic is bound to happen when people start wondering what cloud services can do with their stuff.
The answer is simple : in theory, everything. Abuse will happen. Say no to SaaS as much as you can.
I love GIMP and I will die on that hill (yes, fully aware of the things it lacks, thank you). But for those who use Adobe products, from what I can tell, the answer is that they have no choice in the matter. Adobe is just that ubiquitous in that industry that you either use it or you don’t work in that profession.
With Adobe dipping into AI stuff, I have an underlying fear they’re going to become as ubiquitous in that domain as well, that people trying to compete with them just won’t be able to. And then we will have the same problem in AI with Adobe as we have with Digital Image Editors and Adobe.
Thank you for saying that out loud. I always find the GIMP hate to be phenomenally ridiculous. I love GIMP too.
I’ve worked on a couple of Saas in Europe and thankfully GDPR has shaken things a lot. What you have to look for is terms of use where you are the controller, and the Saas is only a processor. In that case they don’t have the right to use the data you generate for their own purposes. This generally excludes telemetry like product analytics and logs, but even those must not include any user data, just an opaque id and technical informations.