Google Cloud Vision - Which region does Google upload the images to?

Question

I am building an OCR based solution to extract information from certain financial documents. As per the regulation in my country (India), this data cannot leave India.

Is it possible to find the region where Google Cloud Vision servers are located? Alternately, is it possible to restrict the serving region from the GCP console?

This is what I have tried:

1. I went through GCP Data Usage FAQ: https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/data-usage

2. GCP Terms of Service: https://cloud.google.com/terms/ (Look at point 1.4 Data Location on this page)

3. Talking to the GCP Sales rep. He did not know the answer.

I know that I can talk to Google support but that requires $100 to activate, which is a lot for for me.

Any help would be appreciated. I went through the documentation for Rekognition as well but it seems to send some data outside for training so not considering it at the moment.

PS - Edited to make things I have tried clearer.

Answer 1

For anyone looking at this topic recently, Google Vision has introduced multi-region support in December 2019, as can be see in their release notes.

Currently Google Vision supports 2 different processing regions: eu and us, and they say that using a specific endpoint guarantees that processing will only take place in the chosen territory.

The documentation for regionalization mentions that you can simply replace the default API endpoint vision.googleapis.com with either of the regional ones:

• eu-vision.googleapis.com
• us-vision.googleapis.com

The vision client libraries offer options for selecting the endpoint as well, and the documentation gives code samples.

For example, here is how you would do it in Python:

from google.cloud import vision

client_options = {'api_endpoint': 'eu-vision.googleapis.com'}
client = vision.ImageAnnotatorClient(client_options=client_options)

Answer 2

As pointed out by @Tedinoz in a comment above, the answer can be found here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/cloud-vision-discuss/at43gnChLNY

To summarise: 1. Google stores images uploaded to Cloud Vision only in memory 2. Data is not restricted to a particular region (as of Dec 6, 2018) 3. They might add data residency features in Q1, 2019.