News Expose: Is InDesign Using Your Private Data For Advertising?

InDesignSecrets

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News: 1 April, 2018

[Editor’s note: This was our 2018 April Fool’s Post]

We at InDesignSecrets have spent many months investigating an insidious plan by a secret committee inside Adobe called the Design-to-Sell (D2S) group, which has infiltrated the engineering teams of products such as InDesign in order to implement one of the most devious and massive privacy violations in recorded history: The grand larceny of your very private tool choices in an effort to convert your own actions into seemingly unrelated advertising directed toward you.

Adobe’s D2S has been working closely with infamous third-party companies such as Oxford Analytico to apply high-end machine learning AI techniques to the data it collects. With complex algorithms, their Creative Cloud Adobe Sensei technology analyzes which tools you choose most often from the Tool panel and other application panels, allowing the companies to learn more about you than even your own family members.

We have exposed several clear and potent trends in this plot, including:

• American designers using InDesign’s Align panel who click Right Align more than Left Align are carefully identified and targeted with advertising that sells them red baseball caps.
• InDesign users who carefully design with a grid system are noted as rule-followers and shown advertising of clothes in neutral and earth tone colors; while those who avoid grids are considered free radicals and shown advertising with rainbow colors (and cannabis advertising where legal).
• People who use the Gap tool will notice a higher than average instance of advertising for Gap retail stores (or competitors such as Old Navy)
• InDesign users who use the Note tool are… well, actually, no one uses that tool, so they don’t get any special advertising.
• An excessive use of the Drop Shadow feature in the Effects panel is flagged as an “easy sell,” implying that these users will buy anything.
• InDesign users who apply text wrap exceeding .5″ (3p, or 13mm) get sold weight-loss programs.

We have found no method for circumventing this data collection, but we have come up with a recommendation: We suggest you make use of tools and features in the program that you do not ordinarily use. If enough people take this action, we believe that no only will Adobe’s plan backfire (leading literally to a meltdown in the AI computer’s logic circuits) but you will also learn more about the software itself, leading to higher levels of productivity and software enjoyment.

Yes, mark this date! Today is the day that the Truth has finally been exposed!