New service aims to follow users across multiple devices

NEW YORK (AP) — Some 60 companies including leading brands such as Subway, Sprint and the NFL are joining forces to help each other follow you around online.

Adobe, a company better known for Photoshop and PDF files, says the new Device Co-op initiative it is organizing will help companies offer more personalized experiences and make ads less annoying by filtering out products and services you have already bought or will never buy.

Under the initiative, Adobe can tell you're the same person on a home PC, a work laptop, a phone and a tablet by analyzing past sign-ins with member companies.

The initiative comes amid heightened privacy sensitivities after reports Facebook allowed a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, to harvest data on millions of Facebook users to influence elections. Facebook also has been criticized for collecting call and text logs from phones running Google's Android system.

Adobe's initiative underscores the role data plays in helping companies make money. Many of the initial uses are for better ad targeting.

The company timed today's announcement to a digital marketing conference it is hosting this week in Las Vegas. Adobe executives said they believed their initiative offers strong privacy safeguards and weren't worried about a backlash in light of the Facebook scandal.

"With this stuff coming out now around Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, the bar has to be so high in terms of privacy," Adobe executive Amit Ahuja said.

Adobe says no personal data is being exchanged among participating companies, which also include Allstate, Lenovo, Intel, Barnes & Noble, Subaru and the Food Network. Adobe says the program links about 300 million consumers across nearly 2 billion devices in the U.S. and Canada.