 Turns out that Adobe is collecting all of its customers' pictures into a machine learning training set. This is opt-out, not opt-in so if you use Lightroom, for example, it defaults to adding all of your photos to the set. If these are unpublished pictures, work-in-progress, etc. they'll still be analysed as soon as they're synced. I've been using Lightroom to sync photos from my Windows desktop to my iPad. Now I need to reconsider that. 228 comments | Expand all CWs
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First saw mention of this over on Twitter but the screenshot is from when I went to check on it in my own settings. Muting this thread now. Going viral is always a bit unpleasant so I'm going to preempt that by ignoring the thread completely 😁 Definitely. My problem, though, is that I was primarily using Lightroom for syncing (I shoot Fuji and Adobe's results there are mediocre at best). So, it looks like I'll have to bite the bullet and upgrade CaptureOne and use their new-fangled sync feature (which does, admittedly, look better thought out) instead. 🤷♂️ @iar81b @baldur @Szilvia @baldur both :). Darktable has a steeper learning curve I agree. There are also a lot of improvements with the recent versions. I like it mainly because it is open source. You may want to also have a look at Dxo. It is much more user friendly than darktable and extremely powerful. I used their product for a long while after I ditched lightroom.  @baldur #captureone is apparently on it’s own little annoy-your-customers trip, which is sad, since it’s a nice piece of software https://www.dpreview.com/news/3164356226/capture-one-perpetual-licenses-no-longer-include-new-features-functionality-after-purchase @animaux I thought about being annoyed by the capture one update thing, and decided it was fine. Their six month upgrade cycle wasn't much different, in terms of 'you can't have that unless you pay us more'. I just need to be better at thinking about whether I really need a feature.  @baldur :blobcatnotlikethis: I use Lightroom but without syncing anything. Do you have a deep link to that setting? Is that on the web or app itself? If you aren't syncing anything then I _think_ you should be safe. I think it only applies to data that's uploaded to Adobe's cloud. The setting is at this link for me. It should also be linked somewhere in the app itself. @baldur @i_give_u_worms @baldur pretty sure they do exactly that - use your photos to train ml models… @baldur this is scary. But nevertheless the future. Maybe they plan an AI generator like MidJourney or sell information to a platform like that. I know Shutterstock just did. @baldur Thanks for sharing this. I had synching switched in so I could switch between my MacBook and my iPad. What a pain in the arse.  @baldur I object to opt-out analysis of content that’s not private. It’s not clear the analysis here matches your description though; this same text would also cover analyses such as measuring what percent of Lightroom images are landscapes, which doesn’t involve taking images and including them in a training set. @stig AFAICT, most current machine learning approaches involve building a training set of some sort? Also, after its history Adobe does not get the benefit of the doubt from me. @baldur @dave_rogers Adobe, purchased Macro Media, starved and then bordered FireWorks because it made Ps look like the bag of trash it is, and continue to make astoundingly slow software. Oh and PDFs are kryptonite for a11y and mobile, but Adobe insinuated PDF into governments and that war chest of $ allows them to wander around doing this stuff. RIP FireWorks @alan Don't forget the decade-long security disaster that were its poorly maintained browser plugins. And the ElcomSoft/Sklyarov trial. And the buggy nightmare DRM on its software suite. @baldur Ah yes. That too, thank you! PS typo “…starved and then ~bordered~ +murdered+ FireWorks…” @baldur it's not quite what it seems. This is an old setting with badly worded prose. I can't comment too much on it due to corp things but it's not the situation it appears. Hopefully comms will get it's act together soon and clarify what's going on here. Mega corps can't help but shoot themselves in our feet it seems @bendelarre Yeah, the way it's worded would explicitly give Adobe the permission to build a Midjourney style product with our photos. Given everything else that's going on, I think it'd be reasonable for everybody to go and make sure that toggle is turned off. @baldur Odd, I checked my settings and I was already opted out. I wonder if their automatic opt-in (which needs to be stopped everywhere) isn't done to California clients or something? @mybarkingdogs Yeah, been hearing similar things. Whether it's on or off by default seems to depend on jurisdiction or something? @baldur Probably. Off-by-default needs to be standard for privacyvio or usage of content. Especially because the two can overlap - I'm certain people have processed say legal or healthcare documents in Acrobat at some point, or edited NSFW work in Photoshop etc  @baldur i just got Lightroom eso i guessvi need to start uploading lots of abstract forms with random captions  @baldur #darktable @darktable @baldur Stable Diffusion is really hot right now… might be a good market for them to expand into… Imagine being able to train an “art” generating AI on unpublished (therefore likely unlicensed) work, GOLD-FUCKING-MINE :theoffice_michael_laugh: Affinity isn't *within a million miles* of being a LightRoom "competitor" - they're completely different solutions. (I've used Affinity Photo since the day it was released, and Lightroom since v.3) @baldur "great" news... about shitty company that some time ago decided to not allow me to use software that i bought without a crack... (they disabled licence/activate servers for older version of LR/Photoshops) so... i hope that more companies and people will go OUT of their invoice systems. I do not want to sound ignorant, but if you are using Microsoft and iOS, I guess Adobe is the least of your problems...  @vgnpwr @baldur Over here, many photo studios use #Lightroom to process their customer's pictures. So, pictures of myself, that they took some years ago, were probably transfered to Adobe's servers, I assume? @baldur @sk Yeah, the last ten years or so have seen a perverse spreading of loopholes and generous expansion of blanket protection for companies (See also: Every pharmaceutical commercial now has as part of its muttered safety info the following “Do not take [X] if you’re allergic to [X].” We tend to just click on the TOS box, often bc trying to slog through the miles of benign boilerplate in search of the tiny (and increasingly toxic) poison pills is exhausting. @baldur I switched to Capture One a long time ago - partially because Adobe do scummy things, but also just so I could grab a license every few years, instead of having to constantly pay a subscription (although that is also an option). @baldur well this is the push I needed to uninstall Bridge and find a better way to do what I needed. @baldur @pluralistic This nature of ownership of the data being used to train AI models, and the ownership of the subsequent AI value, is going to be an interesting realm for lawyers in a few years. @profpieters @baldur @pluralistic I am curious how #Adobe can assert rights to someone’s copyrighted images, if they contracted with a designer who used an adobe product and didn’t click to opt out @baldur Not sure what would be worse, if this was legal without asking, or if they got away with putting that in their terms. Either case would be a clear sign that humanity is a failed experiment. @baldur Fortunately #Adobe also designed a UI so incomprehensible that #Lightroom hoovered up 2G of data from my pictures a few years ago and has been "training" on just those images for this entire time. I can't figure out how to remove them, I can't figure out how to control what gets pulled onto their server, so I just leave them there and ignore the entreaties to buy more storage space. Finally a good outcome from terrible #UI design. @baldur Have you tried Darktable? I’ve used that and sometimes GIMP too for editing RAW photos taken by my Canon DSLR. I’m not sure if Darktable is Mac or Windows compatible. Speaking of which I should get a CompactFlash card with more storage space. Mine is only 1GB.  @baldur Not surprised that #Adobe is doing that, after my recent experience. When I enabled the #DuckDuckGo App Tracking Protection module on my #Android phone, I was surprised to see that the worst offender, by a couple of orders of magnitude, was #Acrobat. It made over 7,000 tracking attempts in the few minutes before I uninstalled it. @david_megginson @baldur app tracking? I only see the browser, is this a separate product? @baldur My only regret, is that the open source editors became so good, that warezing Photoshop became a bore..  @baldur this is why I pirate everything. Can't steal my data if the application has its ability to connect to Adobe servers entirely excised.   @baldur Does this also apply to Lightroom Classic? The pictures aren't uploaded to the cloud in that instance.  @baldur More data grabbing. Wonder what their long term goal of all that visual data is? AI development.....by big tech.  @baldur That's a rather aggressive approach. Just read that Microsoft is planning to put ChatGPT behind a paywall. So AI platforms are going to use anyone's images regardless, AND make other people pay for what the platforms haven't made. Puzzling.  There's a big Hacker News discussion on that #Microsoft #ChatGPT plan, right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34242193 Generally speaking with #AI in the hands of Big Tech as it is, anything goes. Max. disruption and "break it until you make it" is what we can expect, and a mad dash to get to market dominance. Let others deal with the externalities. @baldur to add insult to injury, they have obviously not taken what they have learned to update their face and scene recognition!  @baldur I wish it wasn’t too much to ask that stuff like this is required to be opt in.  @baldur It (the Universe) is a fractal so yes of course it is there. Someone built the box. Consciousness did the rest. @baldur Whomever finds the misconfigured AWS bucket where they store this wins a prize. @baldur Gotta love when one of the most egregious rent seeking asshole companies then turns around and does this to its customers. I mean, I'm not at all surprised, but it definitely takes a strong "fuck you, we own you" mentality and complete disregard for your customers to orient yourself this way.  @baldur This is insane, because presumably you are paying adobe some fee to use it's products and it's still stealing data from you in a super shady way. There's a strong privacy argument for preferring local desktop applications that this "everything in the cloud" nonsense. I get that cloud storage is super convenient, but it's not _terribly_ hard to to set up a NAS yourself, but I acknowledge not everyone has the know how / wants to do that. @baldur I recommend all artists use alternatives- particularly open source alternatives where available. Krita is one of my favorites- excellent program for illustration @baldur see this is why I use a [mysterious] copy I [found laying in a bathtub] five years ago instead of having paid for the costmoney version it's just better opsec to never have anything in the adobe cloud  @baldur - Sounds like an opportunity to provide 'dobe with a lot of "interesting" training data. @baldur Anyone who trusts any large company these days is just asking to be screwed.  @baldur I dumped Adobe as soon as they went subscription. $60 or more a month for software that crashes constantly and corrupts the files on which you're working? No thanks, throw that away.  @baldur @baldur @baldur not at all surprising, one of thelat lowdown, untrustworthy, monopoly of a company that I have to regularly deal with. @baldur and I considered a subscription for Ps and Lr as "professional" photo tools... ummm. Adobe is becoming more and more evil... @baldur @baldur The wealthy have the right to rifle through your files and plagiarize them for AI magic. They can look up everything about you on background-check sites and track your transactions and face and GPS around the world. The not-wealthy get only spam results now if they search an image site for a shirtless actor. Even the White Pages is the thing of the past! Technology is all about enforcing inequality. And the Dark Age isn't coming by misfortune but by necessity.   @baldur How surprising. (They’re one of the main surveillance capitalists. Everyone knows them for their creative tools but they have a huge adtech arm.) (Search for Adobe on the following page: https://better.fyi/trackers/) :) Thanks for bringing this to the attention of the community. This is a serious privacy issue, as well as an economic issue. We've allowed ourselves to be indoctrinated into a system where large corporations and oligarchies are pretty much given a pass to freely grab and monetize all of our data and ideas, so that they profit while no one else does. This disturbing trend needs to be examined by political common social, and political groups. @baldur this feels a bit evasive. Good to educate people using these tools to look for these settings and ensure they make a choice they’re comfortable with. These days it feels like everything you do online is training data for someone. @baldur I'm really getting behind the idea of the Butlerian Jihad. (Also thanks for the heads up) |
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This obviously only applies if the pictures touch Adobe's servers in some way, such as cloud syncing. That's basically every picture ever uploaded into Lightroom.