🤯 Photoshop is now spyware??

👉 What the fact?!

Adobe has for the last 10 years (or more) dominated the creative professional software market with products for photography, illustration, and web design among other. At the start of 2024 they reportedly surpassed 33 million paid active users as they continue to grow.

These numbers establish Adobe as the market leader for most creative software and are often regarded as the go-to toolset.

However, despite this massive success, they have still received extensive criticism. Comments range from claiming shady business practices, to frustrating continuous software crashes that lose users precious time.

The latest issue on their plate, however, is slightly more serious. Users have discovered that their most recent Creative Cloud ToS update explicitly states they “may access your content through both automated and manual methods, such as for content review” (section 2.2 and 4.1).

Naturally, users are concerned over this statement, primarily for two reasons:

1. Copyright: The most likely scenario here is that this is in regards to Adobe training current or future AI tools that will be released at a later date. Creative professionals have historically expressed strong opinions that they generally do not want their work used a training data for LLM’s and such.
   
   The primary criticism is that it violates copyright laws as the material creators often aren’t given the opportunity to decline to have they're used as AI training data.

2. Sensitive material: A less voiced concern (but arguably just as important) is how this affects professionals with non-disclosure agreements. Workers in government, medical, or high-risk fields often handle very sensitive data that may be processed using one of Adobe’s software.
   
   This ToS change would mean that these users can no longer rely on Adobe’s tools as it would violate national security, patient confidentiality, and more.

The debate continues online on forums like Twitter/X, Discord, and Reddit, with the general consensus being negative toward Adobe.

Ultimately, it may be a case of simple data processing that requires this type of access. If that is the case, however, Adobe has completely failed to explain its position.

Adobe has not yet responded to user concerns.

🔥 Potential impact

Adobe has for a long time ruled the creative space with software like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and more. Despite this “domination” however, user satisfaction has for a long time been very negative. Mostly due to Adobe’s business practices often being seen as money-hungry and even malicious.

The recent dissatisfaction with Adobe will likely cause more users to flock to alternatives. And over the years we’ve started to see more and more alternatives show up, however, few are large enough to compete meaningfully with Adobe.

The company most likely able to compete with Adobe is Canva with its recent acquisition of Affinity.

The most likely outcome is Adobe will respond, apologizing for the confusion, clarifying the ToS, and business will go on a usual with a few less paid users.

Short term this doesn’t seem like a big deal, however, long term I believe Adobe will to suffer from a loss of users as the sentiment towards them grows increasingly negative.

With a tech giant like Adobe, big changes doesn’t happen over night, and it will remain true this time as well. However as time goes on, we’ll likely start seeing more and more stocks take a tumble.

👋 See you next Tuesday!

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