A clarification on Adobe Terms of Use

Colorful image generated with AI. Image Source: Fernando/Generated with AI.

6/10/24 Update:

We’ve heard your concerns about our recent Terms of Use re-acceptance rollout and are committed to addressing and clarifying them. Read our latest article here to learn about the changes we are making to ensure our Terms are clear and reflective of our commitment to our customers and communities.

We recently made an update to our Terms of Use with the goal of providing more clarity on a few specific areas and pushed a routine re-acceptance of those terms to Adobe Creative Cloud and Document Cloud customers. We have received a number of questions resulting from this update and want to provide some clarity.

We remain committed to transparency, protecting the rights of creators and enabling our customers to do their best work.

What is different in the Terms of Use

The focus of this update was to be clearer about the improvements to our moderation processes that we have in place. Given the explosion of Generative AI and our commitment to responsible innovation, we have added more human moderation to our content submissions review processes.

Here’s a view of what was updated

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To be clear, Adobe requires a limited license to access content solely for the purpose of operating or improving the services and software and to enforce our terms and comply with law, such as to protect against abusive content.

When Adobe applications and services may access content

  1. Access is needed for Adobe applications and services to perform the functions they are designed and used for (such as opening and editing files for the user or creating thumbnails or a preview for sharing).
  2. Access is needed to deliver some of our most innovative cloud-based features such as Photoshop Neural Filters, Liquid Mode or Remove Background. You can read more information, including how users can control how their content may be used: https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/machine-learning-faq.html
  3. For content processed or stored on Adobe servers, Adobe may use technologies and other processes, including escalation for manual (human) review, to screen for certain types of illegal content (such as child sexual abuse material), or other abusive content or behavior (for example, patterns of activity that indicate spam or phishing).

Adobe’s continued commitments

Our commitments to our customers have not changed.

We appreciate our customers who reached out to ask these questions, which has given us an opportunity to clarify our terms and our commitments. We will be clarifying the Terms of Use acceptance customers see when opening applications.