Huh. Google Photos on my phone now had a feature called "Lens" that lets me select, copy or translate text from a photo.
That's pretty neat.
Is this… is this covertly sending a copy of the photo to a Google server without telling me
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Lens has a mix of offline and online features but it's primarily an online service. It does have the ability to do OCR and translations without their service, at least if you set it up that way.
There's local OCR without involving Lens. Try selecting text in recent apps instead.
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At least if you're Android 10+, that's a standard feature on a device integrating Play services. Play services has a local OCR library and they made it so you can grab text from apps via recent apps with it. It's one of the few useful Play features that I miss on GrapheneOS.
I wonder if it's a purpose built ocr library or something off of tesseract