Adobe, 'hyper personalisation' and your privacy Business success today is about "data required to understand each person's context in every moment", with the intelligence to take the right action, said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen in the opening keynote of the company's EMEA Summit in London. "People are buying experiences, not products." Adobe Project Felix, a 3D design …
Bullshit.
That's why, by the way, I still didn't upgrade Lightroom. Because I just need a product to edit photos, not a "cloud experience", sorry.
And not having a CEO pay, I buy petrol where it does cost less - "brand loyalty" is only for fools.
But I understand some people have a lot of bovine shit to sell.
Some smaller companies are trying still to sell "products" instead of "experience", but larger one are making a heavy of "influenncers" to driver people to their "experiences" - you'll see very little coverage of competing products.
Tom Hogarty (Senior Director of Product Management at Adobe), is known to invest heavily in PR and in recruiting influencers to driver Adobe adoption, just look at what he says in his LinkedIn profile.
It could be hard for smaller companies to get enough coverage and customers. DxO, for example, went into receivership recently.
"I'm hearing very good things about the Serif products. When they have good cataloguing features then I'll probably wave goodbye to Adobe"
I was thinking about moving from the likes of Paint.net and GIMP to PS. But saw the year on year costs and said "fuck that". I do it part time and there is no way on this planet I would pay that. I know loads of people that are still using the last proper PS, also refusing to buy into this subscription model....and these are people that USED to buy PS every few years.
The Affinity stuff is looking like a perfect fit for me.
I've been using Illy and PS for over 20 years now, and loathe Adobe and its lock in Cloud scam more than ever - so, whilst i'm currently completely locked into Adobe to ensure compatability with files I receive from clients (literally the only reason I finally 'upgraded' from my bought CS4 disc to the ball-twisting irritation that is CC) I buy every Serif product, Just Because. I've barely even used them... .
Adobe needs competition; They need to be forced to open out their file; formats or at least have a significant challenger to compete with something existing and open (EPS or SVG, anyone?).
I'm not hopeful. It'll be years before their current position can be in any way threatened. A shame for me - I used to be a total Adobe fan boy, now their money-wringing business model just turns my stomach.
Just this. It's marketroids who think selling products is beneath them; "experiences" sounds so much more prestigious (or something).
Yeah but without the personal jet and the complimentary Macbook, I'm not buying.
And the marketeer will have a bad hour-long "cellar experience" in my Asian mansion.
Just this. It's marketroids who think selling products is beneath them; "experiences" sounds so much more prestigious (or something).
Customers, OTOH, just want products which are fit for purpose. If they get an experience it's likely to be the bad one of discovering the product wasn't fit for purpose.
I hate articles like this, I also hate companies who sell experience (if I wanted this, I'd see a hooker).
But if you demotionalise it, you are buying an experience, even if your budget conscientious. For example, if you shop at Aldi, but start finding it crowded or constantly taking too long to get through checkout, you'll start to shop elsewhere.
On the topic of CxO's, often they are the biggest penny pinchers of them all!. A couple of years ago I worked with the CTO of one of the UK's biggest FTSE companies, he drove a 10 year old Skoda Octavia, which he then part exchanged for a.... second hand Kia Sportage!
This 'experience' thing reminds me of a light bulb joke:
Q: How many people from Silly Valley does it take to change a light bulb:
A: Three. 1 to change the bulb, and 2 to "share in the experience".
Yeah, it's how these idiots think. Why are we (collectively) ALLOWING them to "define the future" FOR us?
icon, because, facepalm
Yeah, it's how these idiots think. Why are we (collectively) ALLOWING them to "define the future" FOR us?
Max Zorin had a chance, but that eejit from the UK foiled his ingenious plan. "Responsibility to Protect", go figure.
No Union Jack icon, WTF is with this webzine?
Is it because, in reality, this data whoring is not for the benefit of the target?
Personally, when I'm pressed for time and need fuel, any forecourt I'm passing is perfectly acceptable, I don't need the supplier of some of the most insecure shitware out there to be monetising the safeguarding of my personal data.
Looking forward to some fun with registered letters to these pimps, it's certainly going to cost them more that it will me. £1.68 to send, I wonder how much it will cost them to reply? Anybody up for a crowd funder to send a few thousand?
"Personally, when I'm pressed for time and need fuel, any forecourt I'm passing is perfectly acceptable"
And you certainly don't want to waste time getting your car washed. The fact that they thought their scenario meaningful tells us a good deal about their thought processes.
their thought processes
I'm pretty sure that the people at Shell know full well that fundamentally nobody really cares what brand of fuel goes in their car just as fundamentally nobody really cares what brand of washing powder they use.
The whole [vacuous] point of marketing is to take essentially fungible products and pretend they have some essential distinction and the reason so much money is spent on doing so is that it's actually quite hard, but the rewards are huge if you get it right.
I'm sure major brands are very keen to meet "Tom" - a loyal customer with a connected care [sic] and a smart home is the very definition of an idiot who will buy anything. "Personalisation" in this context is simply a euphemism for identifying easy marks - it's really just victim targetting.
In Canada, we're all easy marks. For example, in British Columbia, if you refuse to have a smart home (i.e., refuse a so-called smart meter), you have to pay $32.50 extra per month to the electric company for that privilege.
Stupid 'Я` us.
Just had a good read at GPDR + training.
No way they are going to comply.. as they cannot require you to give them data that is not needed for them to provide the service.. if it is required because they DEMAND it, then no consent.
I dont expect them to be fined whatsoever. I expect them to have an unbrella corporation to deal with data subjects, I mean, customers, and other companies fromthe group to demand this info to the company dealing with the customers, passing the GPDR in appearance.
Sad that we can predict what will likely happen. I hope to be wrong.
I can't help thinking that when we're able to push back* in a meaningful way it may well be that businesses start asking serious questions about what their marketing departments have really been doing for them all these years. If we can actually make them question the value of that it may be a more effective way of dealing with the data-slurping industry than more direct action.
* a typo almost made that into "punch back" which might even fit better.
Adobe. A word to make you shudder.
You just know whatever it is it'll cost a lot and be filled with the weirdest of bugs ass associated with teh functions you specifically bought the carp to do.
Also it'll have some inappropriate and onerous authentication mechanism that will make life a misery
You forgot to say that it'll have a UI that conforms not to the conventions of the platform you're using but something hypothetical that Adobe, in its wisdom, knows is Better. And it won't use the platform's own APIs, it'll use a shitload of Adobe's homebrew stuff, which is, of course, Better.
I currently have Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 on many systems around here. CS 5.5 is no longer supported. CS 5.5 increasingly has... problems. CS 5.5 depends on Java 6, which has different... problems. Java 6 gets deleted with every new upgrade of macOS, and has to be reinstalled. Both CS 5.5 and Java 6 depend on 32-bit binaries, which will soon no longer be supported on both macOS and Windows. (Apple has started to issue 'warnings' about 32-bit binaries...)
I am replacing CS 5.5 on most machines. The replacements are not from Adobe. I had no intention of becoming a rentboy for Creative Cloud in the first place; thank you, Adobe, for adding additional reasons why CC will never, ever, touch any system I control.
When I get into the office today I shall be deleting all things Adobe, down to and including Adobe Reader, except on those machines which cannot connect to the Internet. I expect that this will vastly improve the 'user experience'.
This caught my eye : “I am replacing CS 5.5 on most machines. The replacements are not from Adobe.”
Could you elaborate on that ? Since they started forcing subscriptions I have been looking for good alternatives, mainly for Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign. Decent file compatibility is a must, and I need both mac and windows clients to run it. Sadly I have not found what I’m looking for. Gimp is not the answer, and Corel... well, the less said about them the better.
I’ve got about 70-ish CC users (only 15 of which use more than PS/AI/Acrobat), so it’s not that there is no budget for this. I fear that there’s just no competition for our use case. So, if you’re replacing CS 5.5 : please share !
Have a look at the Affinity products at https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/. Affinity Photo does most of what Photoshop does, and is cheaper than one month's rent of CC. Affinity Designer does pretty much all of what Illustrator does, for less than another month's rent. Allegedly they're working on replacements for inDesign and Dreamweaver. iStudioPublisher http://www.istudiopublisher.com might also be something you want to look at.
Acrobat, unfortunately, is a lot harder to replace fully than I'd thought. PDF Expert and other apps of that type replace some features, but right now only Acrobat Pro does everything. It's very annoying. Acrobat Pro may well be the only Adobe application on my systems going forwards. It appears to be 32-bit, so it will have to be replaced when Apple and Microsoft take 32-bitness behind the barn, but at least it doesn't depend on Java 6.
"Device Co-op is not on personal identifiers. It is hashed," she said.
If you take a hash of a personal identifier that yields a unique hash, then it is a personal identifier. Just because you cannot (easily) reverse it to get the PI does not mean that it is not a PI. If push came to shove just look through the entire database hashing each ID.
Adobe is squirming, trying to evade the law; but they will still be breaking it.
At least you can opt of of creepy data hoarding by Shell, and still be able to buy petrol.
But with online services, it's a question of "here's our privacy policy: take it or leave it". I'm not sure the GDPR is going to help here. You'll be left with a stark choice: agree to their use of your data, or don't use the service.
The GDPR forces them to be more explicit, and not bury the usage in the small print, but I doubt many online services will give you fine-grained opt-in/opt-out for individual ways that they use your data.
Ultimately that's because if the service is "free", then the price is your data.
> As far as i remeber under GDPR a company cannot say "like it or lump it"
Well, that's exactly what they are doing.
Here, for example, is a mail I just got from the government's DART crossing site (where you register for discounted rate charges for the Dartford crossing tunnel/bridge)
Dear Customer
One of the biggest changes to UK data privacy law comes into effect on 25th May.
The General Data Protection Regulation, known as GDPR, is a really positive step towards you having more control over how your data is used and how you're contacted. The changes will also help to better protect your personal data. We have updated our privacy notice to reflect these changes, which you can find at www.dartford-crossing-charge.service.gov.uk/Static/PrivacyPolicy
What do I have to do?
You don't need to do anything as these changes will automatically apply to you. If you don't want to accept the changes you can close your account or your service by contacting us at the following CustomerService@dartford-crossing-charge.service.gov.uk .
Without an account or service, you will have to pay for any crossings at the standard rate for your vehicle. If payment is not made, then you may receive Penalty Charge Notices (PCNs).
In short: if you want to pay the reduced crossing charge, you have to accept the privacy policy in whole, like it or lump it. If you don't like it, go away.
"what you outline is what incurs the big fines."
EU will NOW test this concept. If it works, I think the USA will demand it too. I fear that a workaround is 'ready to go' such that the big players continue to get away with it, while the smaller ones get the fines.
Good luck with GDPR. I want to see it actually succeed. I think it won't, though.
/me imagines the 'forget' list for search engines being SO large that it renders them pretty unusable...
But sovereignty's going to get in the way of enforcing these fines, won't it? How will the EU get their pound of flesh if America won't cooperate and Adobe sits on its virtual market lock-in to wait for people to come crawling back knowing there's no real drop-in replacement for its products that can maintain compatibility? Since they run on a subscription model these days, there's no long-term money at stake, and the nuclear option (embargoes and cut-offs) can spawn complaints of people not being able to bloody do their job.
"no real drop-in replacement for its products that can maintain compatibility"
I've been using Atril to view PDFs for a long time. haven't had any trouble indicating any incompatibility. I used Evince before that, except that they "went .Not" so I'll *NEVAR* install it *AGAIN*. Morons.
I also NEVER use flash, not for many years.
So what else does Adobe provide [with no reasonable open source equivalent] that I might actually need? I suspect that if I can't do it with Libre Office already, or perhaps mash together with gimp, I probably won't think of it [or will write my own application to do it with imagemagick and/or shell/Perl/Python/C]
Maybe you can list a few things I don't know about, just for grins. I'm actually curious.
Adobe is something more than Flash/Acrobat/Photoshop.
Take for example Lightroom. It's a non-destructive editor, which means edits are simply recorded as parameters in a separate location (database or sidecar file [1]), and changes are applied to the image in memory when displayed. The original image (usually a RAW or DNG file, but it could a TIFF or JPEG as well) is never modified. You can read the parameters (they are stored in XML documents), but you may not know what the algorithms exactly do when fed those parameters. Cropping or white balance may be straightforward, but sharpening or noise reduction may not.
Switching to another tool mean:
1) Export the image with the changes applied, i.e. to TIFF. You lose the capability to edit the changes if needed.
2) Start from scratch with the new tool trying to achieve the same result you got in Lightroom - with thousands of tens of thousands of images, it's a quite daunting task, more even so in the beginning when you're not still proficient with the new tool.
Sure, you can use a combination of both as long as your version work on your OS, but it's still a compromise which forces you to juggle among different tools.
Some tools try to import LR edits, but being different, they may not import everything, and you don't have any warranty images will look the same.
Something alike may happen with Photoshop adjustment layers - which GIMP doesn't support yet, AFAIK. You may also need a tool that supports your Photoshop plug-ins, many Windows/Apple one does, under Linux is more difficult.
Premier is a non-linear editor as well, so it could have the same issues, but I never used it.
I don't know how much "portable" Illustrator and InDesign documents are.
IMHO Adobe does rely on this kind of "lock-in" - that's why its subscription model worked.
[1] DNG allow edits to be stored inside the DNG file, but that means the whole file will need to be backed up again for any change, even a very small one.
Adobe is something more than Flash/Acrobat/Photoshop.
Take for example Lightroom. It's a non-destructive editor...
Switching to another tool mean:
1) Export the image with the changes applied, i.e. to TIFF. You lose the capability to edit the changes if needed.
2) Start from scratch with the new tool trying to achieve the same result you got in Lightroom
If those users are that attached to the proprietary software, then they really deserved to be stuck with those proprietary software.
Coming from someone who uses more than adobe suite including a range of proprietary, free and open-source software for specific nice to have features, Lightroom non-destructive editor feature is also just a feature nice to have but not required.
I have seen other image, video, audio, none MS made word document, and a loaded more software that do that. And when times come I need a feature from here and there, it is obvious I would "lose the capability to edit the changes" after mix match that much. That's why non-destructive editing at one point becomes not a required feature. Universal file format import/ export on the other hand becomes more important as it enables you to use the right tool for the right tool anytime you need to.
Not to mention, software is a tool. A fairly good user should know how to get similar results without always relying on sole one specific tool. Taking from example, creating a custom macro with any image alteration software will likely be able to do what most people use lightroom for.
-Went to a friend place and got only photoshop? Create your own macro, bam lightroom results.
-Started your first day but they gave you got zero software for the job? Download a few free tools, click click you get lightroom results.
-Borrowed your friend's pc but it came with ubuntu? Don't matter, open gimp start the macro, lightroom work done.
Sure there 'are' tools far more difficult to have the perfect alternative, and you just got to do what you got to do. But you shouldn't get yourself stuck to it when you do not needed to.
But sometimes, you don't have much choice in the setup of tools available or usable in a given situation. For example, there's practically no substitute for a Torx-head screwdriver when you want to manipulate a Torx-head screw non-destructively.
Similarly, if your contracted editor demands you use Word (for the annotation) or else, it's pretty much a case of "He's the Boss."
You are obviously blinded by your hate of "proprietary software" and it looks never used Lightroom or similar software. Also, your expectations looks very low.
Non-destructive editing is a required feature, not a nice to have. Why don't take advantage of more powerful and sophisticated processing features which means better result, less time used, and thereby more profits?
It's the full difference between working with punched cards and an interactive text editor to write software.
That's why Lightroom - and other non-destructive editors - became the main tool of many photographers (and filmmakers too with their non-linear editors which allows them to make changes quickly).
No macro in GIMP will make it a useful non-destructive editor. The closest software in Linux is Darktable, not GIMP.
No "universal file format" will help you too - a lot of the value is in the algorithms that processes the image too, not only in the image itself. Critical operations like sharpening or noise reduction rely heavily on the quality and power of the algorithms, and different ones may deliver different result. You have to know how to get the desired result - and it's not tool-independent.
You may be dependent on Lighroom, Darktable or Affinity Photo, or whatever you used.
You will still export files in a common format to deliver them, but you still want to be able to edit them differently whenever you need to, without starting from scratch. You editor ask changes to a group of photos? It's far easier with non destructive tools than having to reprocess from scratch, even if you have saved macros.
That's very different from a word processor or a spreadsheet document - where anyway losing formatting of a complex document, or having non-working formulas in large spreadsheet can still be huge issue.
PS: when editing images professionally, you don't borrow someone else's PC, especially if it's not correctly profiled.
PPS: whatever company doesn't give you the tools you need to perform your job, it's not a company to work for...
For true personalisation you could go to one of the many handwashes dotted around the UK these days. The guys* there will get to know you over time if you're a repeat customer. If they know you then you might even get free stuff over time or even know things like where your cars gets the most mucky.
*I've never seen a female working at one
That's like hiring the fox to guard the henhouse.
Hey Adobe! You know what kind of "experience" I want? I want the experience of orgasmic joy I'd feel over your entire corporation being sent away on the B Ark! Now THAT'S an experience I'd enjoy...
You. fekkin. bungmonkies...
No, it's called "I reject your reality and substitute my own. And good luck working with our formats without our tools."
I mean, what if Google decides to play chicken with the EU, threatening to make all Android phones stop working in Europe (which would mean most phones full stop--Android is the market leader)?
The saga of Tim's attempts to get information out of Adobe suggests they weren't very good at personalising their approach to him.
And:"I haven't thought through all of the access and deletion requirements for that but that's something that we’re working on."
Isn't it a bit late in the day for that?
The example given by Adobe isn't just poor for the reason Warm Braw gives. Why would a company give a product away for free that the customer has just expressed an interest in buying? They wouldn't.
In reality, with enough data, Shell would know to mark up this guy's petrol, given he's the kind of weirdo who shops for petrol by brand rather than price or location. And then when he goes to get his car washed they will urinate on him. And it.
"In reality, with enough data, Shell would know to mark up this guy's petrol"
Worse: the Shell station near me has MINI-TV's mounted in the pumps that PLAY ADS while you're dispensing fuel... [I normally ignore them, but they're irritating, and you KNOW that if the fueling station has your personal data, they'll TARGET THOSE ADS TO YOU].
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Pressed for time before a dinner date he asks Amazon Alexa to find him a Shell garage en route to the restaurant. One comes up on his route planner;
Fair enough, he asked for a "Shell" garage, so got one (why someone needing petrol would ask for Shell as opposed to "the cheapest" I don't know, unless they have some sort of rewards/loyalty/discount program...).
From here it just goes completely downhill:
but does it do car wash as well? Apparently not; but another one does.
Why? Did he ask for one with a car wash? Not in the example.
He's "pressed for time", so why would he want to stop and get a car wash?
Since the first hit was of a garage that doesn't have a car wash, I'm assuming it was the one on the most direct (shortest time) route, otherwise why would it have come up first? Why would the system have to further expand the search to find one with a car wash if one with a car wash wasn't on the least-time routing already?
Since he's pressed for time, wouldn't the best customer experience have been to provide a garage (Shell if the customer insists) that would provide the least delay in reaching his destination?
"People are buying experiences, not products."
Marketing drones are repeating to each other that customers actually crave for "personalized experiences", which is newspeak for targeted ads. So, what is going on? They are trying to convince world & dog of their own relevance: "Customers like targeted ads! We provide the best targeted ads! Buy from us!"
We now have ads about ads. What about ads about ads about ads? With a little chance society could soon exile all marketing, SEO and other parasites on a desert island where they can sell their "talents" to each other and leave humanity alone to do constructive things (and sell products, not experiences).
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