Privacy Policy — Drag OCR Translate

Last updated: 5 September 2026

Drag OCR Translate (“the extension”) helps you translate text on a web page — either by dragging a box over it (read on-device with OCR) or, if you turn it on in Settings, by highlighting selectable text directly. This policy explains what the extension does with your data.

What the extension does with your data

• Screen capture of the selected region. When you activate the extension and drag to select an area, it captures the visible area of the current tab and crops it to the region you selected. This image is processed entirely on your device (OCR via a bundled WebAssembly build of Tesseract) and is never uploaded anywhere.
• Highlighted text (select-to-translate, off by default). This only runs after you turn it on yourself, under Settings → “Show the button automatically on every site.” Turning it on asks Chrome for permission to access the pages you visit; that access is used only to show a small translate button next to text you highlight and to read the text you highlight (no screenshot, no other page content). Turning the setting back off removes the permission.
• Recognized or highlighted text. The text is then translated. Where this happens depends on the engine you choose in Settings:
  • On-device (default): translated entirely on your device using Chrome’s built-in AI. The text is never sent anywhere.
  • Google (online): the text is sent to Google’s public translation endpoint (translate.googleapis.com).
  • Google Cloud Translation: the text is sent to translation.googleapis.com using the API key you enter.
  • OpenAI (GPT): the text is sent to api.openai.com using the API key you enter.
  When text is sent, only the text is sent — never the image, the page URL, or any identifier. Host access for the API-key engines is requested only when you select them.
• Settings. Your translation-pair rules, default target language, chosen engine, OCR language choices and select-to-translate options are stored with chrome.storage.sync so they follow your Chrome profile. API keys are stored with chrome.storage.local (this device only, never synced) and are sent only to the corresponding provider. Nothing is transmitted to the developer.

What the extension does NOT do

• No analytics, no tracking, no advertising.
• No collection of browsing history, personal information, or page content beyond the region you explicitly select.
• With the default on-device engine, no data leaves your computer at all.
• No data is sold or shared with third parties other than the optional translation requests described above.
• No data is used to determine creditworthiness or for lending purposes.

Permissions

• activeTab, scripting — only when you click the toolbar icon or press the shortcut: capture the current tab for OCR and inject the drag-to-select overlay.
• storage — save your settings and (locally) your API keys.
• offscreen — run the OCR engine and on-device translation/language detection.
• Host access to translate.googleapis.com — used only if you switch the engine to “Google (online)”.
• Optional host access to translation.googleapis.com / api.openai.com — requested only if you switch to that API-key engine.
• Optional host access to all sites (<all_urls>) — requested only if you turn on select-to-translate in Settings. Used solely to show the translate button next to text you highlight and to read that text; revoke it any time by turning the setting back off.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the “Last updated” date above will be revised. Material changes will be reflected in the extension’s store listing.