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US sues Adobe for ‘deceiving’ subscriptions that are too hard to cancel | The Justice Department alleges that Adobe hid early cancellation fees and trapped consumers in pricey subscriptions (www.theverge.com)

submitted 5 months ago by ForgottenFlux to c/technology

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[–] answersplease77 240 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] ripcord 67 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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)?

[–] answersplease77 89 points 5 months ago (2 children)

she told my sister who is also very stupid when it comes to computers to put it. I wish I was making this up

[–] Potatos_are_not_friends 69 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] answersplease77 37 points 5 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

TRUST THE BOX!

[–] b3an 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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.