How to disable Adobe's ability to scan all of your organization's documents for generative AI


If your organization uses an Adobe Acrobat suibscription, you might have received a communication from Adobe similar to the following:

Dear ...,

We want to share an important notice about new generative Al features in your Adobe Acrobat product. Adobe will introduce a Beta Version of these capabilities in Acrobat Starting ...

The Al Assistant feature uses Al technology to understand your questions and provide responses based on the content of your PDF file. The generative summary feature uses Al technology to provide an overview of the document's organization and content.

The roll out of the Beta Version of generative Al features to Teams customers will happen in a phased manner, starting with customers who have the new Acrobat experience enabled. We expect to roll out to all eligible Teams customers over the upcoming months.

To learn more about these capabilities and how they can be disabled, you can visit this link. Users may disable these features individually or your Admin may disable them for the entire organization.

Thank vou for being a valued Acrobat subscriber.

As we understand it, with this feature enabled, Adobe Acrobat may scan the contents of the PDF files used within your organization, and train their AI model to provide you with assistance relevant to your specific organization. On the one hand, this sounds awesome. On the other hand, if you have confidential information in the PDF files, you might be concerned about the safely of such information. What if Adobe loses control of the data related to your documents that Adobe is storing in its cloud?

If you think turning off the scanning of your PDF files would be a good idea, Adobe offers the following solution:

  • Open Registry Editor (regedit.exe) and select the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\FeatureLockDown

(If this key does not exist, create it.)

  • Under this key create a new DWORD item named bEnableGentech

  • Set the value of this item to 0

If you use Power Shell, the following command should automate the above steps:


$registryPath = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\FeatureLockDown"

$valueName = "bEnableGentech"

$valueData = 0

if (Test-Path $registryPath) {

    Set-ItemProperty -Path $registryPath -Name $valueName -Value $valueData

} else {

    New-Item -Path $registryPath -Force | Out-Null

    New-ItemProperty -Path $registryPath -Name $valueName -PropertyType DWord -Value $valueData
}

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Happy computing!

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