Privacy and authentication

LEXO is local-first: your documents stay on your computer unless you choose Google Docs OCR. It is not an offline OCR engine. OCR happens at Google, through your own account.

Without Google Docs OCR: nothing leaves your machine

These never touch the network:

• opening and previewing PDFs and images;
• crop, split, rotate, merge, extract, reorder, and spread splitting;
• extracting the embedded text of digital PDFs;
• proofreading, editing, and exporting.

The only other network calls are ones you trigger: lexo check-update (or Check for Updates…) asks PyPI for the latest version number.

With Google Docs OCR: what is sent, and where

For each page you OCR, LEXO:

1. prepares a page image on your computer (PDF pages are rendered to resolution-capped JPEGs);
2. uploads that image to your own Google Drive, converting it to a Google Doc with OCR;
3. exports the recognized plain text;
4. deletes the temporary file from your Drive.

Page images go to Google and are processed under your Google account’s terms. Don’t OCR documents you aren’t allowed to upload to Google.

Deletion is best effort: if the delete call fails, OCR still succeeds and the temporary file may remain in your Drive, where you can remove it yourself.

The drive.file scope

LEXO requests a single, least-privilege scope: https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file. With it, LEXO can see and change only files it created itself. It cannot list, read, or modify anything else in your Drive.

Your own OAuth client

You create the OAuth client in your own Google Cloud project (setup). No LEXO server sits in the middle: the app talks to Google directly, and there is no LEXO account, telemetry, or analytics in the app.

Where the token lives

After lexo login, LEXO stores the OAuth token in your operating system’s keychain (Windows Credential Manager, macOS Keychain, or the Secret Service on Linux) through the keyring library. credentials.json is read only while signing in.

Revoking access

• lexo logout (or Account → Sign out) deletes the token from your keychain.
• To revoke LEXO’s access on Google’s side as well, remove it from your Google Account’s third-party connections, or delete the OAuth client in your Cloud project.

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