Ina Fried, Axios:

Adobe on Tuesday updated its terms of service to make explicit that it won’t train AI systems using customer data.

The move follows an uproar over largely unrelated changes Adobe made in recent days to its terms of service — which contained wording that some customers feared was granting Adobe broad rights to customer content.

Again, I must ask whether businesses are aware of how little trust there currently is in technology firms’ A.I. use. People misinterpret legal documents all the time — a minor consequence of how we have normalized signing a non-negotiable contract every time we create a new account. Most people are not equipped to read and comprehend the consequences of those contracts, and it is unsurprising they can assume the worst.

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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission:

The Federal Trade Commission is taking action against software maker Adobe and two of its executives, Maninder Sawhney and David Wadhwani, for deceiving consumers by hiding the early termination fee for its most popular subscription plan and making it difficult for consumers to cancel their subscriptions.

A federal court complaint filed by the Department of Justice upon notification and referral from the FTC charges that Adobe pushed consumers toward the “annual paid monthly” subscription without adequately disclosing that cancelling the plan in the first year could cost hundreds of dollars. Wadhwani is the president of Adobe’s digital media business, and Sawhney is an Adobe vice president.

The inclusion of two Adobe executives as co-defendants is notable, though not entirely unique — in September, the FTC added three executives to its complaint against Amazon, a move a judge recently upheld.

The contours of the case itself bear similarities to the Amazon Prime one, too. In both cases, customers are easily coerced into subscriptions which are difficult to cancel. Executives were aware of customer complaints, according to the FTC, yet they allegedly allowed or encouraged these practices. But there are key differences between these cases as well. Amazon Prime is a monthly cancel-anytime subscription — if you can navigate the company’s deliberately confusing process. Adobe, on the other hand, offers three ways to pay for many of its products: on a monthly basis which can be cancelled at any time, on an annual basis, or on a monthly basis locked into an annual contract. However, it predominantly markets its products with the latter option, and preselects it when subscribing. That is where the pain begins.

The difficulty and cost of cancelling an Adobe subscription is legendary. It is right up there with gyms for how badly it treats its customers. It has designed a checkout process that defaults people into an annual contract, and a cancellation workflow which makes extricating oneself from that contract tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. If Adobe wanted to make it obvious what users were opting into at checkout, and easy for them to end a subscription, it could have designed those screens in that way. Adobe did not.

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Howard Oakley:

Prior to Mac OS X, Adobe Acrobat, both in its free viewer form and a paid-for Pro version, were the de facto standard for reading, printing and working with PDF documents on the Mac. The Preview app had originated in NeXTSTEP in 1989 as its image and PDF viewer, and was brought across to early versions of Mac OS X, where it has remained ever since.

The slow decline of Preview — and Mac PDF rendering in general — since MacOS Sierra is one of the more heartbreaking products of Apple’s annual software churn cycle. To be entirely fair, many of the worst bugs have been fixed, but some remain: sometimes, highlights and notes stop working; search is a mess; copying text is unreliable.

Unfortunately, the apps which render PDF files the most predictably and consistently are Adobe Acrobat and Reader. Both became hideous Electron Chromium-based apps at some point and, so, are gigantic packages which behave nothing like Mac software. It is all pretty disappointing.

Update: A Hacker News commenter rightly pointed out that Acrobat and Reader are not truly Electron apps, and are instead Chromium-based apps. That is to say both are generic-brand shitty instead of the name-brand stuff.

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