Screenshot privacy checker

What a screenshot gives away without you noticing

A screenshot taken to share one thing, a chat message, an error, a design, often carries much more in the frame: an email address in a header, a phone number in a signature, a notification banner, an open browser tab with something private. Before posting a screenshot publicly or sending it somewhere it might be seen by more people than intended, a second look helps, and this tool automates part of that look by reading the text in the image and flagging anything that resembles sensitive information.

What it looks for

• Email addresses and web addresses.
• Phone numbers, matched as runs of digits in the shape of a phone number.
• Long numbers, which could be a card number, an account number or an ID.
• IBAN-like codes, two letters followed by digits in the pattern of a bank account number.
• IP addresses.
• Words such as "password" or "PIN" appearing near other text, a sign that something sensitive is close by even if the value itself was not matched directly.

How the reading works

The tool runs on-device text recognition (OCR) over the image, the same technology a document scanner uses, then checks the recognized text against patterns for each category above. Everything, the image and the recognition, happens in your browser; nothing is sent to a server to be read.

Review before you black anything out

Every match is listed with a checkbox, ticked by default. Some matches will be false positives, such as a date or a product code that happens to look like a phone number, so review the list and uncheck anything that is not actually sensitive before blacking areas out. The image itself shows a red box over each match so you can see exactly where it is.

What it does not catch

OCR reads printed and screen text reasonably well, but it can miss small captions, rotated or stylized text, text inside a logo or icon, and handwriting. It also does not look at faces, addresses written as a location on a map, or content that is sensitive for reasons other than matching a pattern, such as a private conversation with no matched keywords at all. Treat this as a helpful pass, not a full check: look over the image yourself too before sharing it, especially for content that a pattern cannot catch. For selecting your own areas to redact by hand, use the image redaction tool. To check for hidden data in the file itself, such as GPS location, see check file metadata.