Earlier this week I asked you all if anyone had anything to say about their experiences with cancelling Adobe subscriptions, in the light of the U.S. government suing the company over the difficulties this can present.
In short: hoo-boy. Not one but two of you have actually felt the need to cancel your credit cards, due to Adobe’s practice of hitting people with a fat fee when they try to walk away. But first, there’s some breaking news about Kaspersky Lab, the antivirus company.
Kaspersky is one of Russia’s big (well, only) international software success stories, and it’s still headquartered in Moscow—but the company has long denied having ties to the Russian government. Nonetheless, Reuters is reporting that the Biden administration will ban U.S. sales of Kaspersky’s software, because of those perceived ties posing a critical risk.
According to the report, the government is worried about Kaspersky providing a conduit for data theft, the installation of malware, and the general weakening of security by withholding updates. It also seems that government will add Kaspersky to a trade restriction list that would stop U.S. companies from supplying it. I have asked Kaspersky for comment, but none has come yet.
U.S. agencies already can’t use Kaspersky’s software, but private businesses would now have until late September to find alternatives, before the restrictions kick in, blocking further updates. And this—clumsy segue alert—is one way to pull out of a subscription!
Back to Adobe.
DM says he has been an Adobe subscriber for years, and “had understood from very early on that I could cancel at any time if circumstances required it, or so I thought.” Then he learned that “the big red cancellation button, if pressed, would result in an ‘early cancellation’ fee of around $300 being charged to my credit card (about four months’ worth of subscription fees). That was money I didn’t have…It was impossible to cancel without incurring the fee, so I simply cancelled my credit card and refused to pay any more.”
MM tried to cancel within the 30-day period that’s supposed to be fee-free, but couldn’t find out how: “I finally had to cancel my credit card using which I had signed up and get a new card issued…I got my money back with help from the bank but I had to update my new credit card details on all other subscription services which I genuinely use, which was a short term pain.”
SG says his son signed up for an Adobe subscription in ninth grade, leading to “$32.49 month for four years of high school despite multiple lengthy calls to attempt to cancel. Somewhere in there, my attempt to cancel it resulted in the customer service rep starting a second charged service that took me 90 days to get out of.”
Adobe said on Monday, in response to the federal lawsuit, that it is “transparent with the terms and conditions of [its] subscription agreements and [has] a simple cancellation process,” and that it will contest the suit. “Our priority is to always ensure our customers have a positive experience,” said general counsel Dana Rao.
I did ask if any of you had positive things to say about Adobe’s cancellation processes, but sadly received none. However, a couple of you did point out that other companies also make cancellations extremely difficult, with LP saying one “made us get our CEO on the phone in order to complete the cancellation. This took 2+ hours. Is there a lawsuit queue for this type of ridiculousness?”
Not sure about private lawsuits, but I can say the FTC is really trying to crack down on such behavior at the moment—though obviously its resources are too limited to tackle every miscreant. New York’s attorney general also recently sued SiriusXM for making it too difficult for subscribers to leave.
More news below.
David Meyer
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NEWSWORTHY
“Chat control” on ice. EU representatives cancelled a planned vote today on whether to force the likes of WhatsApp and Signal to scan people’s encrypted messages for evidence of child sexual abuse, Politico reports. Privacy advocates had fought hard against what they dubbed the “chat control” law—proposed by the European Commission in 2022—saying it would threaten security and fundamental rights. Countries were split on the issue, and the fact that they can’t agree a common position means they can’t open negotiations with the Commission and European Parliament, putting the law on hold for now.
Sutskever’s new AI play. The OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, who played a key role in the brief ouster of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last year and who recently left the company, has revealed his new gig: a startup called Safe Superintelligence or SSI. Sutskever focused on safety of future AI systems at OpenAI, and at SSI he says safe superintelligence “is our mission, our name, and our entire product roadmap, because it is our sole focus…We plan to advance capabilities as fast as possible while making sure our safety always remains ahead. This way, we can scale in peace.”
Anthropic’s AI boast. The AI firm Anthropic has released what it claims is the “best and most intelligent model in the industry”: Claude 3.5 Sonnet. As Bloomberg reports, Anthropic says this new iteration of its Claude series beats key rival OpenAI in coding and text-based reasoning.
SIGNIFICANT FIGURES
200
—The number of complaints that London’s Prince Charles Cinema received about its plan to screen The Last Screenwriter, which has a script entirely generated by ChatGPT. Therefore, the theater canceled what would have been the world premiere of a film based on the prompt: “Write a plot to a feature length film where a screenwriter realizes he is less good than artificial intelligence in writing.”
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Some child psychologists say U.S. surgeon general’s call for social media warning labels is misguided ‘moral panic’, by Alexandra Sternlicht
Chinese carmakers are losing their appetite for Europe after the EU imposed tariffs on their EVs, by Lionel Lim
Bank of America tells Detroit’s Big 3 they can’t make money in China and should just leave the hypercompetitive car market ‘as soon as they possibly can’, by Christiaan Hetzner
Elon Musk told advertisers to go f*** themselves last year—today in Cannes he explained why, by Bloomberg
Shopify’s gains with big retailers are setting up a nearly $1 trillion opportunity, according to this legendary Wall St. analyst, by Jason Del Rey
Grab’s chief product officer says generative AI is an ‘accelerator’ in its drive to get more people using the app without ‘friction’, by Lionel Lim
BEFORE YOU GO
Silicon Valley security vetting. The Financial Times reports that U.S. tech firms are stepping up their security vetting of employees, due to the authorities warning about Chinese espionage. The report says Google and OpenAI are increasing scrutiny of current and potential future staff, and that Sequoia Capital has encouraged some portfolio companies to do the same. As real as the geopolitical risk may be, some are worried about potential discrimination against colleagues of Asian descent.
