Adobe Password Protect Function not Protecting Documents

Question

Hello,I work for a financial planning firm that sends out confidential documents to clients for the signature via Fill and Sign. To ensure client confidentiality, we have recently starting using password protect on all documents. We thought it was working fine until one of our clients told us the document did not need a password in order to get into it (even though we had set one). When we opened the file on our end, we needed to put in the password, but for the client, it was only after they had signed the document did they then need to put in a password. We trialled it to both our work and private emails and everytime we set a password, the Adobe document that was sent out did not ask for one. How do we ensure that the passowrds work on our clients end?

try67 · Answer

Correct. Unfortunately, there are third-party applications that don't enforce the security policy, or even strip it.

There's a warning about this when you apply a password to a file in Acrobat.

The solution is to ask them to open the file only using Adobe Acrobat. Of course, that makes the entire thing quite useless, as anyone can get around the password protection very easily.

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