Summary
Windows 10's taskbar popup is safe - but Alt-tab is not
AI can destroy Security (on your laptop…)
Can people easily read sensitive data when you record a screencapture?
For 30 years the tech has existed to do some wild things in this area – reading the letters you type on your keyboard (to steal your password) by shining a laserbeam onto the window of your office – like something out of James Bond.
It’s (mostly) real, but so expensive/difficult that only government employees and the like needed to care about the risks.
… but with AI cheap and powerful the risk/reward shifts. What happens when you innocently record a YouTube video and accidentally reveal the text open in your other windows on your desktop?
Approach1: ChatGPT and a screencap
Take a typical screenrecording where the user switched between windows for a fraction of a second, and ask ChatGPT to try and reconstitute the text in the other windows.
During the video, there’s a moment where I move the mouse cursor onto the windows taskbar, and you see a popup of all the open windows from that same app. I paused the video, took a high-res screencap, and gave it to ChatGPT:
Prompt used
"attempt to read the text from this low-res image"
Outcome
…Don’t rejoice just yet – this one was secure, but scroll down to see what happened next…
FAIL. Thankfully the preview that Microsoft Windows uses is sufficiently pixellated that even the current (May 2025) LLM gave up:
"The image resolution is too low for reliable text extraction using OCR. The characters are too small and pixelated after enhancement, resulting in unreadable or blank output.
To proceed effectively, I recommend one of the following:
Upload a higher-resolution version of the image.Upload the original text or code file if available.Crop and enlarge specific sections of the image you want extracted or examined.
Let me know how you'd like to proceed."
Honestly not a huge surprise – I’d expect Microsoft to have addressed this concern many years ago when creating the live preview that happens when you switch windows (because it’s such an obvious source of leaking secrets!).
Approach 2: Alt-tab
But Alt-tab shows a much higher-res preview. What happens with these files open:
When pressing alt-tab, and capturing the screen, cropping to just those two files, we get this:
Prompt used
"attempt to read the text from this low-res image"
Outcome
SUCCESS: disaster, it reproduces the text perfectly.
Note: yes, that’s actual source-code, you could copy/paste it into a code-editor. Nice!
Net: if you’re screensharing, or recording a screencapture (for work, for a YT vid, for friends) … make sure you first close everything on your desktop that might be sensitive. Or investigate video-capture tools that let you specifically block things like alt-tab from showing up (but do you know all the things they need to block? Can you check all of them?)