Adobe Updates its Confusing Terms of Service
After the calamity of Adobe’s recent Terms of Service update (which it turns out wasn’t that recent) they have followed through on their promise of re-writing the terms and adding plain English explanations for the various clauses.
You can find the updated terms of service here. Jason Levine, an Adobe evangelist, posted a good video breaking down of the TOS on X (embedded below)
Today, Adobe released an update to our Terms of Use. In this brief video, I talk about (and give examples around) some of the commonly-asked about terms to provide some additional clarity. The full TOU can be found here: https://t.co/wCEfvlkzK2 #communityxadobe #adobexcommunity pic.twitter.com/YyZWBJlysF
— Jason Levine (@Beatlejase) June 18, 2024
When this first reared its head, I was pretty sure that it was a misunderstanding because this has happened before. I believe it may have been Facebook or instagram that had similar issues with their terms of service that had people were freaking out about it. However, it ended up only being legal language to cover themselves for actually showing your images and allowing the software to operate.
There is an adage: “Never attribute to malice that can be adequately explained by laziness or stupidity” and that holds true here. The Adobe issue was simply down to shortsightedness on the part of the corporate leadership and their legal department. The legal team obviously worded this without any consideration of the users, and I’m guessing the senior management, like everyone else, didn’t actually read the terms of service. I chalk this up to incompetence rather than malice.
Unfortunately, people are still suspicious and many still don’t trust the company. There has long been a simmering distrust of Adobe, which I guess is par for the course with any large corporation, and this incident hasn’t helped. Personally, I don’t have any issue with the company, and I don’t really get some of the more outlandish conspiracy theory “adobe is evil” stuff out there. I get people are still angry at the whole subscription thing, and given the Justice Department is looking into some of the more egregious issues with the way they handled that, I suppose some of that is understandable.
In my opinion, though, their software has been really seeing some great advances lately, so I’m happy with my subscriptions. People need to chill out a bit and use some common sense. The idea that Adobe was somehow reaching into your computer to steal your content was a bit out there in my opinion. Logically, they were never going to do that, or if they did, they would never get away with it. For a start, it would be a massive violation of several laws here in the EU. Why would any company completely sabotage its entire business just to spy on you? I get that people are worried about AI, but companies aren’t suicidal either. Of course, I’ll probably get in trouble for not out-and-out hating them, but anyway.
Right, on to the next drama!
Cover image via iStock Photo
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