DrVomact's Journal: Adobe Acrobat is Spyware (not a surprise)

I'm posting this because I don't know what else to do with it. I've found some obvious spyware behavior with recent Acrobat Reader updates (actually, they probably go back at least to V7), but can't find anything on them via Google. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed this, so it must be a plot.

The problems with Acrobat Reader go far beyond the fact--noted by some others--that Reader calls home. The appalling thing is that once you have installed Reader, all Adobe products on your PC call home. I don't know what these applications communicate, but both PhotoShop and FrameMaker on my PC started doing this after I installed Acrobat Reader V7 (I think it started with V7.0, but it may have been a minor update of V7).

I actually first noticed the problem at work about 6 months ago, when they updated Reader. Whenever I opened FrameMaker, I would get a dialog that said, "Adobe online internal error". An "internal error" is usually something very bad, but FM would start normally after I clicked this dialog. After some investigation, I found out that the dialog resulted from corporate IT having blocked FM from "calling home".

At home, I noticed that both FrameMaker V7.1 and Photoshop were attempting to contact Adobe.com, because Zone Alarm gave me a notification. This had never happened before I updated Acrobat. I blocked both applications from "calling home" via ZA, but then got an annoying "contacting Adobe" progress bar. OK...I then deleted the folder "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Web", figuring that this was the culprit. That helped...I now only get the single "Internal Error" dialog with FM that I get at work. PhotoShop is completely back to normal. Seriously, I'm surprised there hasn't been more of an outcry about this. FrameMaker is a niche product, but can it be that every installation of PhotoShop out there is pirated, and so people are afraid to complain?

My employer can do what they want, but as for me and my house, we will discard Acrobat; I've uninstalled it and am trying Foxit. But even if I have trouble reading PDF docs at home, I am never going to install Acrobat reader again (unless I find a really old version lying around). Adobe obviously has delusions of indispensability.

capture it

[aerthling]

Why don't you try using Wireshark [wireshark.org] to find out what it's sending back? It could be completely harmless system configuration stuff.

Re: Phone Home

[tuxgeek]

Photoshop has had a "phone home" feature for some time. I have photoshop 7, and also found it to be contacting home base whenever it could after a fresh install ... and every day since. An inquiry to some bulletin board such as /. or some other one got me the necessary info to delete the culprit file.

But anymore, whenever I have to run windows, I lock my firewall on boot, and no microsoft based spyware gets to phone home at all (pulling the plug is also quite effective).

When I need internet access, I use Li