I’ll break down how streaming, ride-shares, and cloud services have failed to deliver on their promises, costing you more than you bargained for.
Opt-Out Tuesday: Stop Adobe from using your work to improve its AI
Our Opt-Out Tuesday series was created to help you remove yourself from invasive people search sites. The opt-out process isn’t always easy, so we put detailed instructions for the biggest culprits out there. The list has been growing by the week and now includes over 30 entries.
Now let’s talk Big Tech companies. When you create an account, there are several things they can do with your information. They can sell it to third parties, use it to target you with ads or “improve products and services.” That last one’s a classic.
Adobe has been offering cloud services since 2013, giving subscribers access to its wide range of software and mobile applications. While convenient, the company is using your files to improve its artificial intelligence. The good news is that you can put a stop to it.
Reach for the cloud
When you use Creative Cloud or Document Cloud, you can save images, audio, videos, documents and other files to the cloud. This provides a secure storage method and makes accessing your work from different locations and across Adobe’s suite of products easy.
There’s a caveat, however. Storing your work in the cloud means Adobe has access to it and can do what it pleases, as outlined by its terms of service:
“Our automated systems may analyze your Content and Creative Cloud Customer Fonts … using techniques such as machine learning in order to improve our Services and Software and the user experience.”
Dig deeper, and you’ll find an FAQ page explaining that Adobe uses machine learning to analyze your content to develop and improve product services. What a surprise.
According to Adobe, this is done for efficiency and creativity. The company cites an example: you’ll be able to organize and edit your images more quickly and accurately. And another: automatically enhancing certain parts of your PDFs to improve readability.
Don’t like how this sounds? You have a couple of options:
- The FAQ clearly states that Adobe does not analyze content processed or stored locally on your device, so that’s one route you can take.
- The other is to continue using cloud storage but opt out of the content analysis (as Adobe calls it).
RELATED: Storage 101: How to keep your USB drives and external hard drives safe for years to come
Cellphone and tech clues that your partner is cheating on you
People underestimate intuition. If your gut tells you something is off, don’t ignore it.
Stalkerware is surprisingly easy to plant on someone’s phone, and trackers follow you online and offline. Tap or click for signs whether you’re being watched or just paranoid.
These apps leaked personal data on 100M users. Delete them now!
We use mobile apps every day, and when downloading them, we assume our data will be stored securely. Most users don’t even think twice about the possibility that the app they have just installed is a privacy leak waiting to happen.