GDPR and OCR usage

Athento uses external services to provide OCR functionality, including Google Cloud Vision, Amazon OCR, OnlineOCR, among others. The default OCR configuration uses Google Cloud Vision. You can check this from the setup of the "Extract OCR" automation task.

Athento sends the images through the APIs of these third-party providers and they return readable text that Athento stores. The data processing will depend on the service provider.

Since the use of OCR is on-demand, the customer agrees to the transfer of their images to third-party providers when this feature is activated. The data contained in the images sent to these services are also his/her responsibility.

Below, we provide some important information regarding data protection in accordance with the provider. 

Google Cloud Vision

Google Cloud Platform commitments to the GDPR. You can see more detailed information about GDPR from https://cloud.google.com/privacy/gdpr

Athento uses GCV European endpoints, so images are processed and temporarily stored only within Europe. We use secure protocols in our requests to these endpoints.

Will my images be stored by Google?

No. By default, we send one image at a time and it is processed immediately. In these cases, GCV processes the image in memory and does not persist it to disk. 

In one-off asynchronous batch processes, images may be stored by Google for a few hours. You can read more information on the subject from

https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/data-usage

OnlineOCR

This service is not recommended for European users, as it is provided from the United States of America. 

What other options do I have?

It is also possible to use Tesseract within Athento's local network and other OCR engines such as TOCR. It is possible that the quality of the results may be a little inferior compared to the ones offered by services such as Google Cloud Vision.