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 50% of 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 triall period finished. It's a predetory behavior from a scummy company. I will never forgive them for this.
How did it get her credit card info if she only clicked "yes" boxes? Or was it linked to some other payment system that was set up on her system somehow (MS or Apple App Store or something)?
People on Lemmy, who kinda are on the upper echelons of technical aptitude, forget that the average user is really fucking dumb. Work a stint in level 1 IT and you will get the absolute wildest head smacking issues ever.
And companies capitalize on that by making it incredibly easy to give them money.
My sister who is stupid with computers is a successful consultant with phd in her field lol.
I'm not exaggerating to say 90% of people in the world treat PCs as non-intresting tools do their job. They have privacy-nightmare settings on their phones and never change the default apps or settings on their PC. That's how tech companies earn their billions
Adobe is worse than scammers. Scammers at least have the self realization that they are scamming. Adobe will steal your money and huff on the fumes that they are providing a valuable service by letting people open PDFs.
I recently downloaded their PDF reader (because it's the only app which allows for digitally signing a document with a visible cryptographic signature) and it's 400 MB in size. In no world should a PDF reader be that large.
There's a reason scam artists target the elderly. If a box on the computer screen says "put payment info here" then who are they to argue with the box?
I know it sucks for the call center personnel to have to listen to people yelling at them, but I've had multiple of such companies that were so shitty that the only way to get anything fixed was to keep making people cry until finally someone would push you to a supervisor. Well at enough of them and they will either fix the issue or push you through to their supervisors who will do anything to stop the yelling.
I got to the point where I'll just make then cry because it's the only option left to get any normal responsible behavior from companies. I'll have to call 20 times perhaps but that's what I'll do then
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.
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.
I remember when Adobe was a cool company that built art tools. Now it seems like the art tools are an afterthought, tacked onto a money-siphoning scheme.
Did they ever? They bought PageMaker in 1994 and Photoshop in 1995. They bought Macromedia in 2006, GoLive, Live motion, Typekit, Behance... Is there anything they've ever bought they haven't slowly ruined with financialisation or just outright shuttering what would have been competition?
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.
Thats how I got out of it without having to pay the hundreds of dollars in cancelation fees. I was fuming at the time too, and that was maybe close to 5 years ago now.
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.
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.
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 responses 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.
I’m curious about this. If demonstrable, it seems many Canadians could sue.
What is the typical user workflow? For example:
An embedded Adobe applet (e.g. fill, sign, and submit on the government website)
Token-based API (e.g. redirect or spawn child window/tab, user fills and signs on adobe site, user returned to government site)
Something else (e.g. upload button with server-side validation for digital signing)
Edit: looked into this a bit. Did you receive an error message like the following?
This document does not allow you to save any changes you have made to it unless you are using Adobe Acrobat Standard DC or Adobe Acrobat Pro DC
(Regardless it’s totally shitty that government websites recommend a specific company’s software, especially Adobe. I’m just trying to figure out if they actually force citizens to pay a private company.)
Ha good fucking luck charging an early cancellation fee to the VIRTUAL CARD I GENERATED AND DESTROYED THE MOMENT I DECIDED TO STOP PUTTING UP WITH YOUR SHITTY "SERVICE"! FUCK you, Adobe. You get NOTHING from me.
