OCR Privacy Guide

ScanText is built for privacy-first OCR. By default we process images in your browser when possible. This page explains what happens to your files in each mode.

Many free OCR sites upload every file to the cloud by default. ScanText reverses that model: browser OCR runs locally with Tesseract when your device supports it, which means photos of IDs, invoices, or personal notes can stay on your machine for that step.

ScanText has no OCR server: text recognition runs in your browser, and the only things downloaded are the OCR engine and language data. We do not require an account, and your files are never uploaded, stored, or used for training.

You can verify this yourself: open the network tab in your browser's developer tools while scanning — you will see language data downloads but no image upload. For regulated workflows, on-device OCR fits well with your own retention policies because the file never leaves your machine.