Photoshop Terms of Service grants Adobe access to user projects for ‘content moderation’ and other purposes

urska@lemmy.ca to Linux@lemmy.ml – 355 points –
Photoshop Terms of Service grants Adobe access to user projects for ‘content moderation’
nichegamer.com
73

You are viewing a single comment

Thankfully I don't do anything that requires me to have Photoshop, but if I did, I'd be explicitly blocking all outbound connections in the firewall.

Pretty sure the way Adobe’s licensing works you need to be always online to use it

Then you would violate the agreement, which could terminate the access to your stuff and the app.

I doubt that for two reasons:

  • There's no non-admin way for an app to discern if it's a firewall block, or a legitimate no-internet situation (i.e. didn't purchase in-flight WiFi). It would also look really bad PR-wise if a company banned customers just because their internet went down or was otherwise spotty.

  • How would they even know? Their software can't tattle on me if it's been blocked from establishing a connection.

They could require the app to connect once every 30 days or similar in order to keep functioning.

Well, the software knows if it has access. Like you would know if you don't have access to their files, when trying to access. I didn't say they could detect this reliably, just that it would violate the agreement, in which case they have the right to terminate the access.

Maybe this is only about access to files saved on their server and not locally on your drive. In that case, this doesn't matter to our discussion. But if they access your drive, as the previous comment suggested it silently by blocking access with a firewall, then one should be ready to get banned doing so. Maybe there is even a software installed on your machine that checks this... You wouldn't know, because its all closed source.

Nobody does anything that requires them to use Photoshop. Use GIMP.

There are plenty of people who need a better editor than GIMP considering how long it's gone without a major refresh (this isn't a whinge it's been over a decade). For anyone that actually cares about their sanity there's Krita, that actually tries to build a program for professionals.

Edit: Let alone Krita can actually be used by schools, while GIMP isn't because of the name.

Holy shit, will people ever shut up about the name? The truth is that barely anyone actually gives a shit except FOSS zealots trying to come up with excuses for why GIMP wasn't successful (or those belonging to the anti-GIMP circlejerk that's surfaced as of late trying to come up with new nonsensical reasons to hate a random piece of FOSS). Outside of the English-speaking world, the amount of people who give a shit about GIMP's name is precisely zero and the word gimp is almost exclusively associated with the program. Even inside of the English-speaking world, I see GIMP used to refer to the program more often than for anything else. The amount of people actually who actually care about the name is negligible and the amount of brand recognition that would be lost from a rename would significantly outweigh the benefits of possibly having a couple more schools think about maybe starting to use GIMP.

And the truth is that as far as FOSS GUI programs are concerned, GIMP has been tremendously successful. It's easily among the most popular, alongside Blender, Firefox and LibreOffice. It is and always has been far more popular than Krita in both professional and non-professional contexts. I've seen it installed on the computers of both my secondary school and college, because it turns out school computer labs need image editors and they're not going to pay for Photoshop licenses.

But it hasn't been more successful than Photoshop. And Firefox hasn't been more successful than Chrome. And LibreOffice hasn't been more successful than MS Office. And Blender hasn't been more successful than Maya. And Godot hasn't been more successful than Unity. And I could go on. Because no single FOSS GUI program has achieved industry standard status. Though Blender has a pretty good shot at making it.

The only one that seems like a FOSS zealot here is you my friend...hope you learn how to be kinder to folks during conversations.

I actually think that it wouldn't take too many more people using GIMP for the name of the program to be considered the primary meaning of the word in English.

GIMP 3.0 should be out this year. If you're interested, you can already use some of the new features (like true non-destructive editing) by running the development version.

https://www.gimp.org/news/2024/02/21/gimp-2-99-18-released/

Oh thanks for the heads up, I wasn't aware! I'll have to check it out when it drops :)

No worries :) It's a big release and is gonna really bring GIMP up to date. I'm super excited about it!