🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm not at all delighted at this guy's pain, but this guy's pain is effectively self-inflicted!

Adobe does not REQUIRE a user to register their software although it certainly has the legal right to do so given that the software is licensed, not outright purchased. Other companies in fact do require such registration.

Adobe is hardly an aggresive marketing company. You can register your software without providing anything other than simple contact information such that we can legitimately assist you if you just so happen to lose your serial number. No "personal data" is required - only the simple basic contact information is mandatory. (You don't need to disclose how many talking chickens you own, when you last rotated your tires, and what brand of toothpaste you favor much less income or other really personal data.) You can readily specify what type of contacts, if any, Adobe will make with you. You can effectively specify NO marketing contacts whatsoever. And Adobe does honor your requests.

But if a user chooses not to register, we cannot assist them in terms of what their serial number was because we don't simply don't have it. Although product activation does send Adobe the product serial number, it does not send any user identification information. The only way we can associate a particular user with a serial number is via registration. And if a user wants to be so anonymous that they won't provide the simplest of registration data, then yes, we cannot assist them and the user assumes a significant risk -- without registration (1) we cannot assist with serial number retrieval and (2) we cannot provide technical support. And quite frankly, if they suffer "thousands of dollars of damage" because they cannot retrieve a lost serial number that they refused to register, they have only themselves to blame.

- Dov