Most apps that read anything off your screen ship what they capture to a server somewhere. That's the default, not an accident: it's easier to build, easier to debug, and it gives the company a copy of your data to do things with later. DriveLens was built the other way around: the most sensitive data it touches never leaves your device, and that's a deliberate architectural choice, not a missing feature.
How DriveLens actually reads an offer
DriveLens doesn't have API access to Uber or Lyft, and it never will. That's not how it works. When you grant DriveLens the Android screen capture ("screen sharing") permission, it can take a screenshot of what's already visible on your own screen while a shift is active. It runs that screenshot through on-device optical character recognition (OCR) to pull out the offer details, then scores it.
That's the whole pipeline: screen capture, then OCR, then score. Nothing about that process requires or benefits from a server round-trip, so there isn't one.
What never leaves your device
Regardless of whether you have an account or a subscription, the following stays local, full stop:
- Raw OCR text recognized from screen captures
- The screenshots themselves
- GPS trace logs recorded during shifts
- The data your personal heatmap is built from
If you uninstall the app or clear its storage, this data is gone, and we can't recover it for you, because we never had a copy of it to begin with.
What does sync, if you choose to sign in
Creating a DriveLens account is optional. If you do, a narrower set of data can sync to our servers so it's available if you sign in on another device: your driver and vehicle profile, a few preferences, and (depending on your tier and whether you've turned on backup) your shift history or full ride history.
Even then, the raw material behind all of it (the screenshots, the OCR text, the GPS traces) still never makes the trip. What syncs is the processed output, not the sensitive inputs it was built from.
Why this matters
Your driving data is a detailed record of where you go, when you're available, and how you make money. That's worth protecting on its own terms, separate from whatever a specific platform's terms of service say about third-party tools. Keeping the sensitive layer local by default means there's simply less to protect, less to leak, and less for anyone (including us) to have an opinion about.
For the complete breakdown of what syncs, what doesn't, and why, see the Privacy Policy.