You may recall the noise earlier this year when Adobe decided to capture all PDFs to their cloud, on open, for generative AI training.
They have apparently now gone a step further and are proactively capturing PDFs from Outlook as well – without the document being opened at all.
Why the default matters more than the feature
It can be turned off. That is not the point. The point is that it is on unless you turn it off, which means every organisation that has not specifically gone looking for the setting is currently in the opt-in state without having opted in.
For a regulated environment that is a serious problem, not a preference. Legal, DoD, SEC, HIPAA, anything touching personally identifiable information – in all of those, “documents left the building by default” is the kind of sentence that starts an incident report.
What to do about it
Turn it off, obviously. But it is worth asking the larger question while you are in there: there are many other PDF tools available now, and most workflows can be moved off Adobe with a minimum of effort. We generally recommend doing so.
A note on reading this later: vendor defaults change, sometimes quietly and in both directions. Treat the specific setting described here as a prompt to go and check your own estate rather than as a current description of Adobe’s behaviour.
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our cybersecurity work deals with – talk to us about yours.
