Adobe Acrobat Has The Ability To Process Your PDFs In The Cloud BY DEFAULT In Some Cases… Here’s How To Stop That
Over the weekend I worked with a client that specializes in among other things, mergers and acquisitions. And that activity is often confidential. So they tend to be very paranoid about the software that they install on their computers. As part of an audit that they regularly run on their computers, they discovered that Adobe Acrobat had this feature, if you want to call it that, that uploads PDFs to the cloud to process them using AI. That’s not something that you want if you’re this firm.
Here’s the setting in question:
Just reading what this option does makes it clear that if you want your PDFs to stay confidential, this box must be unchecked. For bonus points, you should also uncheck “Show AI query bar on document” and “Show AI summary Bar on top of the document”. But the fact is that these options are on by default. My advice would be that all Adobe Acrobat users should check these options and take whatever action they deem that are required to ensure their privacy.
This is a huge reminder that you should never trust the default settings of any application. Especially related to AI. Because you never know what an application might have changed via an software update or something like that.
This entry was posted on July 7, 2025 at 10:18 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Adobe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Adobe Acrobat Has The Ability To Process Your PDFs In The Cloud BY DEFAULT In Some Cases… Here’s How To Stop That
Over the weekend I worked with a client that specializes in among other things, mergers and acquisitions. And that activity is often confidential. So they tend to be very paranoid about the software that they install on their computers. As part of an audit that they regularly run on their computers, they discovered that Adobe Acrobat had this feature, if you want to call it that, that uploads PDFs to the cloud to process them using AI. That’s not something that you want if you’re this firm.
Here’s the setting in question:
Just reading what this option does makes it clear that if you want your PDFs to stay confidential, this box must be unchecked. For bonus points, you should also uncheck “Show AI query bar on document” and “Show AI summary Bar on top of the document”. But the fact is that these options are on by default. My advice would be that all Adobe Acrobat users should check these options and take whatever action they deem that are required to ensure their privacy.
This is a huge reminder that you should never trust the default settings of any application. Especially related to AI. Because you never know what an application might have changed via an software update or something like that.
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This entry was posted on July 7, 2025 at 10:18 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Adobe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.