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by cantrevealname 3291 days ago
> All uploaded images and the extracted text are deleted immediately

Until they are served with a subpoena for a particular client, or a sweeping subpoena to store everything forever, or the company is sold and the new parent has different values, or the company decides to mine customer data for advertising uses, or there's a bug in the software, or there's a long-lived cache of the data, or it gets into their backups accidentally or deliberately, or they don't keep the data but keep "just" the meta-data, or they do statistics or analytics before deleting the data, or they are hacked, or they simply change their minds.

In terms of privacy, even a non-free non-open-source local app with DRM or license management is better than a server app with a "strict privacy policy". With a good firewall setup, you can be pretty sure that the local app won't betray you.

1 comments

It doesn't seem reasonable to blame them for an arbitrary potential future when they're currently doing the right thing.
"The best way to avoid privacy breaches is not to formulate a detailed privacy policy; it's to reduce your capabilities so that you're unable to violate anyone's privacy."

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-01-19-playing-chicken-w...

No, however the description of the plugin should make it clear data will be uploaded to a third party server for recognition so the user can make a choice about that.
It more or less does.

`For developers: Copyfish is published under the GPL open-source license. As OCR software, it uses the free OCR API from https://ocr.space/ .`

I don't find that clear at all. And this is also important to non-developers.

Also, for nearly all documents I ever need to scan, if they're important enough to require scanning, they're important enough that a third party should have nothing to do with them.

The majority of exceptions to the above being, ironically, documents without text, sketches, doodles, etc.

> when they're currently doing the right thing

You mean that we have to place some trust that they are. Some users cannot afford that kind of trust.