- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@lemmy.ml
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Did EU bite USA?
Over the barrel, please.
My prayers are heard. I hope you burn in the lowest circles of hell, Adobe.
I assumed their HQ was moved there long ago.
Yup. Though many people call it “Utah”
Summary:
- The US government is suing Adobe for allegedly deceiving customers with hidden fees and making it difficult to cancel subscriptions.
- The Department of Justice claims Adobe enrolls customers in its most lucrative subscription plan without clearly disclosing important plan terms.
- Adobe allegedly hides the terms of its annual, paid monthly plan in fine print and behind optional textboxes and hyperlinks.
- The company fails to properly disclose the early termination fee, which can amount to hundreds of dollars, upon cancellation.
- The cancellation process is described as “onerous and complicated”, involving multiple webpages and pop-ups.
- Customers who try to cancel over the phone or via live chats face similar obstacles, including dropped or disconnected calls and having to re-explain their reason for calling.
- The lawsuit targets Adobe executives Maninder Sawhney and David Wadhwani, alleging they directed or participated in the deceptive practices.
- The federal government began investigating Adobe’s cancellation practices late last year.
- Adobe’s subscription model has long been a source of frustration for creatives, who feel forced to stay subscribed to continue working.
- Recently, Adobe’s new terms of service were met with backlash, with some users interpreting the changes as an opportunity for Adobe to train its AI on users’ art.
- The company has also faced regulatory scrutiny in the past, including antitrust scrutiny from European regulators over its attempted $20 billion acquisition of product design platform Figma in 2022, which was ultimately abandoned.
Cancelation fees (and steep ones at that) on digital goods/“services” … shows how far things sunk towards the lower hells.
It should seriously be illegal. I can’t believe companies are able to get away with this. If you don’t have the money to cancel, you’re just locked in
I’ve been on the verge of cancelling my subscription for multiple times now. But everytime I try an alternative it’s missing something (for instance capture one mobile does not do masks/layers…), and so I keep shipping shitloads of money to a company which has dickass privacy rules and extorts you out of money.
It doesn’t help Adobe has software patents for their products, so anyone who makes a similar program has to either live in a country that doesn’t recognize the “right” to claim you invented math, or be risk being sued.
Just know that Canva bought Affinity.
That’s why I’m a pirate matey
Depending on what you’re doing, Krita is worth a look. I gave it a go for cropping and lightly editing some photos recently, and then tried their version of the clone stamp tool. It’s hidden under the brushes presets, but worked better than the Photoshop tool 👍
I decided to try out the new version about a year ago. I had a monthly charge of about $26 I think it was. After about 3-4 months and not really using it, I cancelled a few days before it would renew for another month. $50 early cancellation fee? Wtf do you need to cancel a few mins before or it’s early cancellation? Adobe fucking sucks ass.
That’s the trick, it’s always early cancellation, there is no allowed time to stop sending them money.
these cocksuckers were charging my 70-yr-old computer-illetrate mom nearly $80 a month because “she wanted to be able to open pdf on her laptop”, and then once I found out and tried to cancel this pro subscription which she had, they forced us to pay a $200 cancelation fee which amounts to the remaining months until the end of the year. Adobe came pre installed and all she did was click on yes, yes, yes after the trail period finished. It’s a predetory behavior from a scummy company. I will never forgive them for this.
That is peak shittiness. Thank goodness your Mum has you to advocate, and I shudder to think of how many others don’t and were shafted or continue to be shafted.
Their competition for PDF Reader; Foxit, jacked their prices up considerably this last year too. It used to be an affordable alternative. They too got greedy (I assume since Adobe was getting away with it!) and have lost a considerable amount of customers in both the consumer end-users and the business side.
PDF becomes increasingly more used and ‘standard’ with the fracturing of ability to edit them or do ‘advanced’ tasks like merging multiple PDFs.
There are some alternatives which are free but also either Freemium or just plain questionable in their usage. I don’t want to trust some random company and I don’t want to be nickel and dimed for basic features like merge.
I spent a long time testing and trying tools. Sadly nothing as comprehensive as what Acrobat offers, but not an option at their pricing. Same with Foxit. I use PDFsam for some basic merge stuff. An interesting project is also Stirling PDF. but pdfsam is like Freemium and Stirling I’m pretty requires docker and it’s also not in all languages.
It’s so refreshing to actually have my tax dollars starting to fund consumer protection again.
If Trump gets in office again, it’s back to backsliding. Because apparently consumer protection is “big government” or some such shit.
Any corporation that does should just go bankrupt. Seriously, will you live fine without them? Of course. Will society continue to exist? Of course. Fuck these fucking scums.
I saw this coming, with no easy way to cancel the monthly subscription and decided to pay with a prepaid credit card instead…glad I did, it saved me from getting robbed.
There used to be a “loophole”, where if you changed to a different plan, it restarted the 7 day period during which you could cancel with no fee. Not sure if they ever changed that though.
Funnily enough, I just had to sign up for the trial for reasons and made sure to cancel immediately after I was done. I was worried I’d just forget and pay for a month or something.
Adobe’s name is mud these days.
Somewhere on my PC I have a several page long rant about how many government websites in Canada require you to pay for an Adobe subscription in order to sign an “official” PDF.
Why the hell isn’t there a better option for filling out legally required, government mandated forms than giving a private corporation money? This bothers me so fucking much.
What’s even more crazy, is Adobe has a system called something like “docusign”, where you can just fill the document in in-browser.
I’m fortunate that I haven’t yet hit a form I couldn’t just edit in GIMP!
Feeling daring? If you have to buy the software anyway, invoice the government department the price of the software.
My mom worked in accounting for the local government. You’d be surprised how many invoices are getting paid without double checking
You can’t fill it out with Firefox? I think pdf.js (which Firefox uses) supports PDF forms.
Nope, I’ve tried every other option I could think of. All the browsers, a few websites, ms office products, non ms office products, some graphic design tools… to Adobe’s credit they did a great job making sure people had to pay
Ahh, it’s probably using some proprietary features that only exist in Adobe products.
I’m not sure if they still sell it, but Adobe used to have a suite of form tools where the person filling out the form had to use Adobe Acrobat (it used some non-standard PDF form features), and the company collecting the form repeonses had to use software built on top of Adobe ColdFusion (which costs thousands of dollars per server). They really tried to lock people in to their form ecosystem.
This is beside the point, but it might help some people in the short term: I was able to switch my subscription plan without penalty and then cancel immediately without the cancellation fee. Maybe that still works.
Yeeeeeeee get fucked by the big dick of the government
