uninstall adobe acrobat. it is malware. it has been malware. these aren't opinions: acrobat meets the definition of malware.
it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually
it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity
this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need
adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups
i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:
open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable
no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever
not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof
cheers
Firefox's built-in PDF.js viewer: does everything you could want from a basic viewer, fast enough search, and can now do annotations for filling in forms and such
KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.
LibreOffice Draw: I don't ever really like having to open this but if you have to edit a PDF in detail it does work, and doesn't just vomit up a bunch of polygons when you give it text to work with. Better as an authoring tool than an editor.
So...it's actually WORSE than this post lets on.
For at least 4 years now, Adobe Acrobat has scanned to detect antivirus and anti-malware software, because it knows that its behavior runs afoul of their monitoring, and then adjusts its behavior to avoid detection when doing shady things:
See this Reddit thread.
Also, all this behavior is threatening to users' security and privacy in multiple ways. Not only is it bad on its own, but Adobe Reader has, for years, been a vehicle for hackers, viruses, and other malware to get access to people's computers and data.
When Adobe Reader itself starts evading and bypassing security measures, and this becomes accepted as the default, it will make it much easier for other bad players to use it as a way of taking control of your machine. A compromised application with lots of privileges and ability to evade oversight by antivirus programs is much more dangerous than an arbitrary compromised application.
If you care at all about security or privacy, never ever install Adobe Reader.
I've been exclusively using free alternatives to it for around 18 years now, and I very rarely run into any compatibility issues and the last time I did was more than 5 years ago.
