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I thought I had found exactly what I was looking for: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract

Everything was perfect, until I read:

Since 2006 it is developed by Google.

I would rather not have Google spying on everything I OCR, please.

Is there an alternative which is not infested by Google?

I've looked long and hard and it sadly doesn't seem to be the case. Although I wonder how exactly it's "developed by Google" since nothing about that repo seems to suggest that it is except for that sentence...

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  • Upvoted for helpful question by a new community member, and for possibly coining the term "non-Google-infested"! :) Nov 13, 2020 at 4:45

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I can suggest you to use the open source GOCR. It may not be powerful than tesseract but you may not have concerns regarding data theft.

gocr is an optical character recognition program that can be used from the command line.

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Tesseract OCR is a free open sourced command line OCR built in C++. Its development is paid by Google, but contributions can be made by anyone.

You can use use Tesseract without giving Google anything. If you are very concerned run it on a virtual machine that has no network connection. Personally, it is much easier to set up in Ubuntu "sudo apt install tesseract-ocr-eng libtesseract-dev -y" done! Personally I use it with WSL2 on Windows and use Python to interact with it.

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