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Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

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Re: Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

#51
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a deal breaker because THAT'S NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS, and that also goes for Copyfish. It smells fishy to me, and _promises_ never kept prying eyes away secret documents. People who handle confidential documents should never use SaaS. It's an issue of trust, and Copyfish deserves none.

Okay, don't use it then. They make no claims of enhanced privacy and frankly it's unreasonable to presume a service such as this would do all processing locally unless you're paying a premium for that ability. Or did I miss the "Great for confidential documents!" banner? For most peoples' use-cases, this is not a concern.

It's cheaper for a service to OCR locally than remotely.

Re: Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

#55
post #6

Similar Chrome extension I wrote using Google Cloud APIs: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-vision/nblmo...

It is actually on Chrome as well: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/copyfish-%F0%9F%90...

I started using it a bit ago, the area selection seems a bit wonky, but otherwise works.

Re: Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

#56
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, don't use it then. They make no claims of enhanced privacy and frankly it's unreasonable to presume a service such as this would do all processing locally unless you're paying a premium for that ability. Or did I miss the "Great for confidential documents!" banner? For most peoples' use-cases, this is not a concern.

It's cheaper for a service to OCR locally than remotely.

There is simply no good OCR engine available that can run inside a Chrome or Firefox extension. The best available is Tesseract.js. And while this engine is fantastic as a project, its recognition rate does not come close to what is available server side.

Re: Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

#57
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 backup…

It doesn't seem reasonable to blame them for an arbitrary potential future when they're currently doing the right thing.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about you explain what on earth you're talking about if you're going to take the time to disparage this product here?

Read the page. Yes, it isn't obvious is it? Look down the bottom. https://ocr.space/ It uploads everything to a commercial OCR service. Which provides these CPU cycles 'for free'. Who owns this data? Do you have a privacy agreement with ocr.space? Can you trust them as far as you could spit? It doesn't matter that this is documented though. Unless it had a popup banner EVERY TIME YOU USED IT saying "Your data will be…

I think you are going a bit too far with your requirement for a popup banner every time you use it. Do you expect a popup banner every time you click a link on a web page taking you to a third party website, because they are going to be able to run javascript code on your computer?

As long as the plugin is clear that they are using a third party service that will recieve your images, I think it is fine to leave it at that. Not everyone feels that is a deal breaker, and they shouldn't be annoyed by a pop up just because their deal breaker is different than yours.

Re: Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

#59
post #28
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah apparently it uses https://ocr.space/ , deal-breaker for me.

I understand that hosted OCR, just like SaaS in general, is not suitable for every use case. On the other hand, the OCR.space OCR API has a very strict privacy policy: https://ocr.space/privacypolicy - All uploaded images and the extracted text are deleted immediatly after processing.

Why did you end up going with a .space domain? We blocked that whole TLD because we were getting massive amounts of spam from it when it first came out.

Re: Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

#60
post #50
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem reasonable to blame them for an arbitrary potential future when they're currently doing the right thing.

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/ .`

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