Privacy Policy
Effective Date: February 2025
Last Updated: February 2025
1. Introduction
At CaptiOCR, we believe your privacy is fundamental. This Privacy Policy explains our approach to data protection and privacy. CaptiOCR is designed as a privacy-first application, operating entirely on your local device without collecting, storing, or transmitting any personal data to external servers. This document outlines how the application functions with respect to your data and privacy.
2. Data Collection Policy
CaptiOCR does not collect any of the following:
- Personal identifiers (name, email, address, etc.)
- Device information or hardware specifications
- IP addresses or location data
- Usage statistics or interaction patterns
- Content of your screen captures or OCR processing results
- Any text extracted during the OCR process
- Metadata about your documents or meetings
- Browsing history or application usage
3. How CaptiOCR Works
Understanding the technical operation of CaptiOCR is important to understanding our privacy commitment:
- Fully Local Processing: All OCR functionality runs exclusively on your device, with no external API calls or cloud processing.
- No Network Activity: The application functions without internet connectivity after installation (except for optional language file downloads).
- Screen Capture Handling: When you select an area of your screen for text extraction, these captures are:
- Temporarily stored in your device's RAM during processing
- Processed locally by the OCR engine
- Never transmitted outside your device
- Deleted from memory once processing is complete
- File Storage: Extracted text files are saved only to your specified local directories.
- No Telemetry: We do not implement any usage tracking, analytics, or telemetry mechanisms.
4. Third-Party Services
CaptiOCR does not integrate with or utilize any third-party services that would have access to your data. The only external components are:
- Tesseract OCR Engine: An open-source OCR engine that runs locally on your device.
- Language Files: Optional downloadable language data files that enable text recognition in different languages.
These components operate entirely within your local environment and do not transmit data externally.
5. Your Data Rights
Since CaptiOCR does not collect any personal data, many traditional data rights are automatically fulfilled:
- Right to Access: We maintain no data about you or your usage to access.
- Right to Deletion: No user data exists on our servers to delete.
- Right to Portability: All your extraction results are already stored locally on your device in standard formats.
- Right to Correction: No personal data is collected that would require correction.
You maintain complete control over all text files created by CaptiOCR, as they exist only on your local device.
6. Children's Privacy
CaptiOCR is designed for general audience use. Since we do not collect personal information from any users, including children under the age of 13, no special provisions for children's privacy are required under COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act). However, we recommend parental supervision for any software usage by children.
7. Data Security
While CaptiOCR itself does not present data security risks related to remote storage or transmission, we recommend the following security practices:
- Download CaptiOCR only from official sources (our website or official GitHub repository)
- Keep your operating system and security software updated
- Implement appropriate access controls for sensitive text extractions saved locally
- Be mindful of screen content when using CaptiOCR in public or shared environments
8. Changes to This Privacy Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy periodically to reflect changes in our practices or for other operational, legal, or regulatory reasons. We will post any updated versions on our website and include the latest revision date at the top of this document. Significant changes will be announced through the application update notifications, our website, or GitHub repository.
9. Open Source Commitment
CaptiOCR is open-source software, meaning the source code is publicly available for inspection. This transparency allows any user to verify our privacy claims by examining exactly how the software operates. Our code can be reviewed at our GitHub repository.
10. Contact Information
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or our privacy practices, please contact us through:
- GitHub Issues: https://github.com/carlosacchi/captiocr/issues
- Email: coming soon
We welcome your feedback and are committed to addressing any privacy concerns promptly.
11. Conclusion
CaptiOCR represents our commitment to privacy-first software design. By operating entirely locally without data collection or external transmission, we provide a tool that respects your fundamental right to privacy while delivering valuable functionality. We believe that powerful tools don't require privacy compromises, and we're dedicated to maintaining this standard as we improve CaptiOCR.