this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
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privacy

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

that would require knowing the formats of strings. And it requires the text to be text.

What if you had a photo of a handwritten piece of sensitive information?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I doubt that OCR (optical character recognition) is done on device so it likely being sent to some server for processing.

As a software engineer, in any of our corporate applications when a user hits delete we toggle an archived flag, but the data is still there. So I wouldn’t trust any application to do what it actually says.

There are so many technical barriers for recall to ever be able to not snipe your private data that I wouldn’t go anywhere near the thing.

Edit: Furthermore, what happens when MS inevitably gets hacked again and someone steals all the data it has and then starts using that to commit fraud.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 days ago (2 children)

As a software engineer, in any of our corporate applications when a user hits delete we toggle an archived flag, but the data is still there.

What many people don't realize is that this is how some low level data stores work as well. Even regular ol' file systems do this (basically).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

For a site called boring sql I found that very interesting and informative. Thank you for sharing!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

Yeah I was shocked when I first started and was questing this behaviour with the owner and lead engineer.

They assured me it complies with GDPR as after a period of time we will anonymise the data.

[–] lath -4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I don't understand your meaning. Screenshots of a photo are still screenshots and manipulating text on a photo is already a thing (you can use phone camera to translate text directly from a fixed surface).

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

handwritten. ocr isn't perfect, especially with handwritten content.

[–] lath 2 points 3 days ago