I'm starting a crusade for internet privacy and protection from unwanted tracking and advertising.

Today I made the mistake of actually reading Adobe's licensing agreement for acrobat reader.
I tried to copy and paste paragraph 6 on privacy, but it won't.
I googled adobe's stand alone license agreement, but it is a pdf, so I cannot display it without first agreeing to it.

Bottom line is, if you install acrobat reader, you must agree to a policy that allows adobe to sell the right to imbed ads, tracking cookies, javascripts, and various other things in pdf files. This right has no limits, and you also agree that adobe may give/sell this right to others that are not governed by adobe's privacy policy

open ended permission for anyone to put anything in a pdf document.

So... I need to read PDF's.
I'm not going to do it with Adobe Reader.
I'm not going to pay money for the priveledge either.

I've found a couple free readers, but so far nothing that will automatically open a pdf from a website.
Any suggestions?

I use deskPDF by Docudesk for creating/reading my pdfs.

I posted a while back about a PDF virus and got slammed by a few people saying it's not a big deal. The company I work for uses PDF files, we make them and also use reader to read them of course. I work for a very large company that ended up not using Adobe for a few months and went way back to a very old version of reader it was 3.0 or something until adobe fixed the privicy issues. I found out that they fixed it for us and we basicly run a version not available to the public. Our problem was being a very large defence contractor and dealing with this issue. If you have an old computer with an old version still on it maybe you use it?

ok, well I installed firefox, and then installed PDFescape

And it doesn't work. still has no idea what to do when i click on a pdf in a website.

fyi, this is windows 7.

I use Nitro pdf reader and converter. Not sure if it has similar issues as Adobe but its been great for converting from Word or Excel into a pdf format for emailing to people that cant read excel etc.

Jim- You need to tell the browser which application to use for a PDF file. In Firefox, go to Tools->Options->Applications to set the application to use for PDF's.

I'm using Firefox 3.5 with Foxit Reader and it works well. You can load PDFs through the browser (though I never do, I hate that) and it even loads up faster than the newest Acrobat Reader. Worth checking out if you're still looking into this.

Can you use these converters in reverse... to scrape a .pdf into an Excel or Word document?

Newer versions of Acrobat Reader let you copy and paste text and images from a document, but trying to convert a PDF into another format usually just results in the formatting getting hosed up.

Jim,

I did accept it a few weeks ago. I have made NO other changes to my computer other than the upgrade to the current version. Could that possible be what is slowing my computer down for moving around? FYI. I do run the clean programs, defrag, etc.