Privacy Policy

Smart Text Capture is a local-first OCR browser extension. It is designed to recognize text in your browser without uploading captured screenshots or extracted text to a cloud OCR service.

1. Data processing

When you select an area of a page, the extension captures the visible browser tab, crops the selected area, preprocesses the image, and runs OCR locally in your browser using Tesseract.js/WASM.

Captured screenshots and image files you explicitly choose are used in memory for OCR and are not saved by default. Extracted text is saved only when local history is enabled.

To keep the install small, only some Tesseract language models ship inside the extension. The first time you use one of the other languages, the extension downloads that model file from our own domain and stores it on your device; afterwards that language works with no network access. The request contains only the language code — no screenshot, no recognized text, and no identifier. You can download or remove these models yourself in Options.

2. Data storage

The extension stores settings, quota state, license state, and OCR history in chrome.storage.local on your device. History can be disabled in Options, and you can clear history at any time. Pro backup and restore accept only supported settings and history fields and are limited to a 10 MB file.

3. Data sharing

Smart Text Capture does not upload captured images or extracted text to any server. The current version does not use OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, cloud OCR, or any AI API for recognition. The only OCR-related network request is the one-time language model download described in section 1, which is a plain file download from our own domain.

4. License verification

Paid license features may contact our backend service to activate, deactivate, validate, recover a license by email code, process purchases, or manage an account. OCR images and extracted text are not sent to that backend. One-time management links use short-lived tokens and are removed from the browser address bar after use.

5. Your controls

You can disable or clear local history. Pro users can export and restore a local backup. You can also choose whether to allow anonymous product-event measurement. When enabled, the extension sends only an event name, optional paid-feature gate reached, extension version, browser family, and a hashed random install identifier to our service. It never sends recognized text, screenshots, image files, URLs, email addresses, or license keys. We retain those events for up to 90 days.

6. Abuse prevention

Public API abuse prevention temporarily stores a keyed hash derived from the requesting network address. The raw address is not stored in application data, and expired rate-limit records are removed automatically.

7. Permissions

The extension requests permissions needed to capture the active visible tab, inject the selection overlay, store local settings and history, add context menu actions, copy text to the clipboard, and run local OCR in an offscreen extension document.

8. Contact

Questions about privacy? Reach us via the contact page or visit AnhBui Dev.