Adobe’s Latest Security Patch Installs Chrome Extension to Collect Data

tecklyfe.com

50 points·mindfrost82··7 comments

HN comments from yesterday

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13387551

Although the data is supposedly anonymized and doesn't include URLs, this is basically as bad as it sounds. The extension is installed by default, with spying turned on by default.

Chrome enforces a one-time check when you next use it re: keep or discard the extension.

Before we get the inevitable "Why are you using Adobe Reader?!" Plenty of rich PDF forms, including those used by the US government, require the use of "real" Adobe Reader to work correctly.

Without it you can still fill in the form but validation is complete, signing is missing, direct submission doesn't function, and dynamically generated content (like QR codes) don't work.

Adobe Reader is pretty mandatory if you are doing anything more with a PDF than hitting the print key.

F200 Company working for the US Gvmt. here. We had no problems using PDF-XChange yet.

So don't use Chrome?

Maybe Vivladi as an alternative to the main stream browsers:

https://vivaldi.com/?lang=en_US

No: don't enable the extension in Chrome. Or don't use Acrobat Reader at all.

I hadn't heard of this before the Acrobat Reader security patch was pushed, but my gut reaction when seeing the confirmation dialog for that extension was "hell, no way". Adobe's track record with security is not good.

Switch to a web browser that uses the same engine but isn’t open-source? Why?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com