While IANAL your privacy policy seems to basically state that you may collect all information sent to you (including images and text) and then use if for anything you like including sharing it with partners and arbitrary third parties.
http://www.abbyyonline.com/en/Help/PrivacyUp
This would make the service more or less useless for anything but testing, I cant really send any information of value through a system that reserves the right to share that info with anyone for any purpose.
Have I missunderstood something or do you have another service / privacy policy that is more suited for something other than development / testing?
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I can understand your confusion since there is so many links to different privacy statements, but they are about different things (like site itself, forum, other services like ABBYY FineReader Online, etc.)
Cloud OCR SDK usage is actually regulated by this agreement: http://cloud.ocrsdk.com/Account/DisplayDeveloperAgreement
And it basically says, if you want to keep your documents safe - just don't forget to delete it after recognition.
If you read it more carefully, you will find that there is a rule, saying that if you don't delete it within 24 hours then you grant us right to use images for improving our service. I think this is important to explain that.
We do take data privacy seriously, and in no case data will be distributed outside or made public. We introduced internal procedures in order to be able to provide our service for companies who deal with images containing private data.
Nevertheless, any service needs maintenance. Maintenance is done by people. We monitor its performance, do regular updates, and investigate crashes and errors. Only limited number of trusted personnel has access to the service internals, but still they have. This sometimes involves interaction with database. This 24 hours rule actually says that we introduce additional level of security that prevents regular maintenance procedures to interact with recent data, giving it additional time to be removed. It is hardcoded into our standard admin tools.
I know, legal language is always written the way it minimized risks to the company. So it is very primitive currently. However, actual data security does not come from agreements; it comes from technical and administrative measures taken. And this is what we do in order to be trusted service provider.
Nevertheless, if there are legal regulations that require special language in agreements, you may contact our sales team and discuss custom agreement. Also, doing OCR in-house is always an option, we may offer you our great SDK for that too.
Ok, that one seems more reasonable. I got the other one by clicking on the "Start free trial now" button, there is a link to a privacy policy there which I assumed was for the cloud sdk since that was the button I clicked.
I however also have some issues with the sdk-policy. I mean most data that I would want to ocr is to some level personal / confidential. Its not like they are top secret or anything but its still information that I would prefer others wont have access to. And looking through the sdk-policy I can not say that it makes me feel safe to use.
From your policy "You should not include personal and/or confidential information within Uploaded Data" and "If Uploaded Data has not been removed within the period mentioned above, You agree such Uploaded Data is personal and confidential data-free and consent to ABBYY’s use of it for the purpose of improving the quality of the Service." still makes me a bit sceptical to use this service, I mean if I fail to delete something or there is a bug of some sort the information is declared "public".
I thank you for your prompt reply and clarification but it seems that my slightly paranoid mindset would still be better off with a local (in house) solution or a more privacy centered service.
Please append your original question with more details, rather than adding another answer to your own question. I updated my answer wtih more details.
Thank you for mentioning wrong ling at Start Free Trial button, we will replace that with right one
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