Offline versus online processing: which approach better protects user data in high-risk industries?
Hey everyone, I've been wrestling with this for a while now at work—trying to figure out whether sticking to fully offline processing really keeps user data safer in stuff like finance or healthcare verification compared to sending everything through some online API. Last year we had this tiny scare when a cloud-based tool we tested suddenly had a weird delay and I started imagining all sorts of interception risks during transit. Made me super paranoid about anything touching the internet when handling passports or IDs. What do you folks think actually makes the bigger difference for high-risk setups—keeping it all local on the device/server or going with a well-secured online service?
Hey everyone, I've been wrestling with this for a while now at work—trying to figure out whether sticking to fully offline processing really keeps user data safer in stuff like finance or healthcare verification compared to sending everything through some online API. Last year we had this tiny scare when a cloud-based tool we tested suddenly had a weird delay and I started imagining all sorts of interception risks during transit. Made me super paranoid about anything touching the internet when handling passports or IDs. What do you folks think actually makes the bigger difference for high-risk setups—keeping it all local on the device/server or going with a well-secured online service?
Yeah, I've run into similar headaches myself. A couple projects back we switched to doing everything on-premise because even the tiniest chance of data hitting someone else's server felt too risky for the compliance folks. Processing IDs right there on the user's phone or our own hardware just gives you that extra peace of mind—no uploads, no logs sitting somewhere in the cloud. I ended up checking out https://ocrstudio.ai/id-scanner/ a while ago when we needed something that could handle all those weird international formats without phoning home, and honestly it felt like a relief to have that full control locally. Speeds weren't bad either once tuned. Still, every setup has trade-offs, but for anything sensitive I lean hard toward offline these days.