Google seems to be running OCR on photos in my Gmail. Is this happening to you too?

KitCat
Thu, 06 Jul 2023 16:25:08 +0000

This morning I was asked to find an archived email with photos of some scientific equipment. I searched "Powerlab," the name of one of the instruments, in gmail, and the email came right up. Great! But then I noticed that the word "powerlab" never appeared in the text of the email. I tried searching "ML206", an arbitrary character string from one of the photos in the email, and again, the email appeared in the search, without the search phrase highlighted in the search result, as it normally would be. I tried different phrases from jpgs in emails; not all yielded search results but some did.

I'm not happy about this. I accept some compromises to privacy when using Gmail, but sending text as an image can be a way of specifically avoiding information being harvested. All I ask for is a way to turn it off.

Can anyone replicate this? Did anyone already know about this?

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~tech/17o1/google_seems_to_be_running_ocr_on_photos_in_my_gmail_is_this_happening_to_you_too

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