Yesterday I wrote about the controversy surrounding Adobe and its updated terms of service. Creators were furious after receiving a pop-up window forcing them to agree to the new terms: if they didn’t, they couldn’t access Photoshop, nor could they delete the app from their machines.
But it wasn’t just the fact that the terms were mandatory that alarmed so many users. The new language seemed to suggest that Adobe was claiming the right to access creators’ work for a myriad of reasons: It rubbed many the wrong way, as many professionals have NDAs on their work with Adobe apps. Of course, despite the legal situations, many also rejected the idea that Adobe could have access to work created by these creators simply because Adobe created the apps they use in the first place.
Adobe remained silent on the matter until the publication of this blog post. In it, the company explains that its changes to its “Terms of Service” were actually minor adjustments and were intended to bring clarity to the company’s moderation policies. The company posted a snippet of the terms to the blog post, with the new additions highlighted in pink (including any items that were deleted from the previous terms):
Credit: Adobe
According to Adobe, what’s new here is that the company says it “can” (not “only will”) access your content through automated and manual methods, and that it’s reviewing content to check for illegal content, including sexually abusive material. children. If an automated system thinks something is illegal, it flags the item for human review. The rest of the terms are apparently the same as they’ve always been, and the popup that appeared was a routine re-opt-in campaign for users to agree to the minor changes.
Since this “access” was at the heart of the dispute, Adobe went into more detail in the blog post about why it needed it. The company says it needs access to user content for three specific reasons: to perform standard functions in apps (such as opening files or creating thumbnails); for cloud-based features such as Photoshop Neural Filters and Remove Background; and as set forth in the terms above, to check for illegal activity or other offensive content.
The company also says it doesn’t train Firefly Gen AI models on your content, nor will Adobe ever “take ownership” of your work. If you’re wondering why the company specifically says Firefly Gen AI models and not a more general statement about AI training in general, it’s because the company does use the content you store in the cloud, including images, audio, video, text or documents, to train its AI. Any data you upload to Adobe’s servers is fair game for this process and is aggregated with everyone else’s data to train Adobe AI to “improve [Adobe’s] products and services.”
It’s not explicitly stated in the blog post, but Adobe’s support article says that you can opt out of this training by going to your account’s privacy settings, then disabling the switch for Allowing my content to be analyzed by Adobe for product improvement and development purposes under Content analysis.
What is the ultimate goal?
Adobe probably isn’t constantly searching your work looking for insider secrets about your projects, and it flat out says it won’t claim ownership of your projects. However, the company i can access to everything you upload to Adobe’s servers: This access allows Adobe to scan for illegal content, but also allows the company to delete your work to train its AI models.
While opting out of AI training is wise, the best way to continue using Adobe applications without worrying about Adobe access is to keep all projects local to your machine. If you don’t use Adobe’s cloud-based services, the company can only access your work for app-related tasks like generating thumbnails—if the terms are to be believed.
These policies have also been in place for an undisclosed amount of time: the pop-up you may have seen this week was to agree to small changes Adobe made to the terms, not to agree to radical changes. You’ve already agreed to these policies – you just didn’t know it. My recommendation? Limit your cloud work with Adobe going forward unless you absolutely need it for work. The more of your content you can keep on your machine, the better.
