Democracy Pulse GOV

Potentially Malicious Software Pdfgear Dangers Of Reddit Recommended

Alistair Lowe
-
potentially malicious software pdfgear dangers of reddit recommended

What do you want advice about? This software called PDFGear What have you considered or looked at already? Its free and it does what I want, but am I the product? In brief, tell us about your privacy threat model? I installed PDFGear and its great but its free - cant see any way for them to make money except to sell customer data. Is there any way to run this app in a way that my data is safe?

I recommend using LuLu or Little Snitch to block all connections to and from the app to get what you want. But no, it doesn’t automatically send or share user data or files or anything of the sort to its own servers. I say this because I checked the last time I used it. It does send some telemetry which can be disabled or fully blocked by these apps. It is spyware or malware, or at best setting you up for a scam.

It’s covered in detail in Reddit - just search PDFgear in Reddit and you’ll see the evidence substantiating it all. Be careful - PDFgear have created fake accounts trying to convince people that it’s legitimate software and to not believe the claims against it. But evidence speaks for itself. I second @TheRealMaverick here. There are multiple sites that seem to report malicious activity. The articles claiming otherwise are all listed on their own website. At the very least it’s suspicious.

There’s no clear business model and they are getting money somewhere. Do you need annotation? Okular is a well known open source document reader under the KDE project and is hosted on the Microsoft App Store. If you good annotation and form signing features it might get more complicated. I was just using it to compress pdfs mostly. These are then uploaded to publicly accessible websites. So in that use case I couldn’t care less if its stealing it in the background.

I did use it to repaginate a lengthy document to upload to our tax authority - but I sincerely doubt if it is really getting sent to the internet in the background. Our internet is slooow, I would have noticed. Outside of Reddit, I failed to find any negative sentiment - is Reddit the place allowing the spreading false information?

It wouldn’t be the first time… But I suppose if I really care about privacy I should uninstall it… So on 2nd of April 2024, PDFGear made an explanation about this. They stated that they want to grow the user-base as quickly as possible, gather the most feedback as they can, and then go Freemium, and decrease the functionality for free tier users, when they get the upper hand in the market. This strategy is a version of what consumer advocates call “Bait and Switch”.

It’s intentionally making a loss on a products in order to funnel the customer in buying some other subscription later, and I don’t condone it. Their website is also using a bunch of trackers, which will undoubtedly make some revenue. But probably the analytics on the products themselves are their driving force right now for them sticking to this business model.

It’s generally better to go with an open-source alternative for sensitive stuff like PDF’s, and BiggishDoctor’s recommendation is great: Alternative is https://pdfsam.org/ FOSS Software, I recommend sticking to their basic (visual standalone for compression) as this is where the no catch gets and install standalone as the installer Well let’s just say at some point it forced itself to enhanced which is not what we wanted but the standalone one does not do this 1 Suka

People Also Asked

Potentially Malicious Software: PDFGear & Dangers of Reddit ...?

It’s covered in detail in Reddit - just search PDFgear in Reddit and you’ll see the evidence substantiating it all. Be careful - PDFgear have created fake accounts trying to convince people that it’s legitimate software and to not believe the claims against it. But evidence speaks for itself. I second @TheRealMaverick here. There are multiple sites that seem to report malicious activity. The artic...

PDFgear's Statement on Disinformation Spread on Reddit?

I did use it to repaginate a lengthy document to upload to our tax authority - but I sincerely doubt if it is really getting sent to the internet in the background. Our internet is slooow, I would have noticed. Outside of Reddit, I failed to find any negative sentiment - is Reddit the place allowing the spreading false information?

PDFGear - whats the catch? - Get Advice - Techlore Forum?

What do you want advice about? This software called PDFGear What have you considered or looked at already? Its free and it does what I want, but am I the product? In brief, tell us about your privacy threat model? I installed PDFGear and its great but its free - cant see any way for them to make money except to sell customer data. Is there any way to run this app in a way that my data is safe?

PDFGEAR app malware : r/mac - Reddit?

What do you want advice about? This software called PDFGear What have you considered or looked at already? Its free and it does what I want, but am I the product? In brief, tell us about your privacy threat model? I installed PDFGear and its great but its free - cant see any way for them to make money except to sell customer data. Is there any way to run this app in a way that my data is safe?

Malware analysis https://www.pdfgear.com/download/ Malicious ...?

I recommend using LuLu or Little Snitch to block all connections to and from the app to get what you want. But no, it doesn’t automatically send or share user data or files or anything of the sort to its own servers. I say this because I checked the last time I used it. It does send some telemetry which can be disabled or fully blocked by these apps. It is spyware or malware, or at best setting yo...