What’s the best way to protect a pdf document? Like from being copied shared printed downloaded? I think Google docs offers that.
Thank you
I guess there‘s no good way to do that; a ScreenShot works anytime
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Yes but I’m asking specifically about if there’s a privacy friendly service that has those features that GoogleDocs has (licking printing, editing, copying, etc.)
You’re pretty much asking for DRM here.
Which is very intrusive, expensive to implement/pay for.
And never really works.
Expect that everything you push on a website, will be available for the end users without any limit (you can’t pull it from them in an easy way).
You could provide the person with a temporary link that expires given a specific amount of views/date and also have some way to disable the client-side right click so that they cannot easily download/print.
But as said above, everybody can screenshot or even take a photo with their phone.
Even big companies has not achieved to protect their thing because it is technically not possible to do it in a simple-enough way without advanced and intrusive technologies.
Also, with this kind of thing it’s always more
how to make it more difficult for them
rather than
how to make it impossible for them
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Encrypting it with a password. Acrobat will also allow you to add flags that Acrobat reader can’t bypass.
It’s all digital pinky swears though. You’ll have better luck with a non disclosure agreement signed by the receiver.
I assume OP meant
once open, how to prevent printing etc
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Sorry. I meant “restricting with a password”. Per https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/desktop/protect-documents/protect-with-passwords/restrict-printing-editing-and-copying-pdfs.html you have to add a password when you add the restrictions to print/edit.
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Oh, interesting!
Does it work if open inside of a web browser?
Does not block you from seeing the source, using a screenshot or your phone camera but definitely a cool (evil proprietary company) feature I concede that. 
If you have the resources and time, you could create your own PDF viewing web service without allowing any printing. I’m sure there is some simple javascript library for convenient implementation.
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You still send it down the pipe, no way for you to remove access to it for anyone willing to open their network tab.
Hence, a very small barrier overall.
One can program the server to serve a PDF viewer rather than fetching the PDF from the client side and then loading it into a PDF viewer though.
Even if you proxy with some backend, you will still not restrain the user from being able to copy/screenshot/camera photo it.
No DRM achieves that one easily and too much effort overall without a guaranteed result.
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Per Wikipedia, these print and edit restrictions are closer to a drm. Dependent on the viewer software. Testing it with your browser should tell you if it works.
I have no Adobe software on any of my machines but that’s definitely a good lead for OP!