Thursday, August 18, 2016

The Sad State of Foxit Reader

The tl;dr is:  Foxit Reader, tracks your usage and sends it to their servers (in China!!), installs a service that you can’t uninstall without uninstalling Foxit Reader, and is not proxy aware.  There is currently no way to disable any of the cloud based functionality, or user tracking.  Long version below:

After installation, you can see the Foxit Reader Service installed (left), but no option to uninstall the service (right), whereas previous versions you could:


If you disable the service as shown above, Foxit will give you the below prompt EVERY TIME you open a pdf or start the application:








Foxit Reader sending your IP and MAC address to Foxit's servers

Logging data sent to Foxit's servers

 The below shows a list of User Agent's found in the FoxitConnectedPDFService.exe memory:




Lastly, the Detected field shows the protections Foxit has put in place on the exe: