Privacy concerns with image text extraction

[Advil]

I'm really freaked out that my Galaxy S21 now overtly offers to extract the text from my photos. I've been taking photos of sensitive information that I didn't want written down and readable for a long time so that data mining bugs couldn't get hold of it (unless they just copied my screen, which I heard is a thing). So, everyone seems to be discussing how cool and interesting this new feature is, without considering the potential pitfalls, I can't find a single article about whether this feature can be turned off. I know that it runs through One UI Home, but One UI Home is responsible for the entire Galaxy setup, so iI cant just delete it, and I see no options for this feature. 

Does anyone know anything about this? 

Forever greatful 🙏🏼

Ben.

[DylanU]

Have you checked in the camera or gallery app settings?

[Advil]

I did! More extensively after reading this, thanks! Hopefully someone brings the issue into focus, then smarter people than me can give us all the details 🙏🏼

[SeaViews]

This is a feature of One UI that seemingly cannot be disabled. Perhaps ask Samsung social media on how to disable the functionality for security reasons.

[Advil]

Thank you! I searched everything I could, but it's good to have some confirmation from others in case I missed something :).

[mattwellerphoto]

It is the OCR in the Gallery app that has been present since OneUI 5. Maybe it isn't storing this information off device, if it is, I am sure Samsung would face a massive class action lawsuit, I don't think they are that crazy to take a risk.

However, whe in doubt you can always "disable" the Samsung camera / gallery app. But then you would need to delect 3rd party apps, who can you trust?

[Advil]

Thanks Matt! I couldn't find the specifics, but knowing that its imbedded in that and if worse comes to worst, I could disable it, at least temporarily, thats very handy.

That's right, I think once a technology is out there, and I couldn't imagine encrypted camera and photo tools being too fancy lol.

I think I read that it was in beta in OneUI 5, or was installed early leading up to the official release. The terms and conditions imply that they can do whatever they want, but there are laws about being sneaky and not forthcoming which over-ride them.

I read through a few versions of the terms and conditions (that stuff is dry -_-) and they're very vague about what they use information collected through OneUI and AI features for. I don't use the customisation option, and I'm very careful with all of the other privacy settings, particularly Google. Hopefully the fact that you have to press the yellow icon before it extracts, means that it's all manual (I might toss them a few bones to make sure).

[_nok_]

To add on others suggestions, you can also try enabling this setting to know if any apps access your clipboard.

Settings > Security and privacy > Privacy > enable "Alert when clipboard accessed"

As for the OCR, I don't think you can disable it on settings level, maybe there are ADB commands to do this. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Members_SiACiR0]

Stop the extract text option. It's *** a lot of people off.