Is it private to record your own screen for productivity analysis?
4 min read · TimeLeak
Short answer: yes — if, and only if, the capture stays on your machine. Recording your own screen for self-analysis is legally and ethically your business on a personal computer. The privacy questions worth asking are practical:
- Where do frames go? The only safe default is a local folder you can
open and delete. TimeLeak writes to
~/TimeLeak/logsand auto-deletes after 7 days. - What reaches the AI? A compressed text digest of aggregates — app
names, window titles, counts. Frames are included only when you explicitly pass
--vision, and even then it's ~20 sampled images you can review first. - What about passwords and banking? Use a redaction list: windows whose
titles match "bank", "password", etc. get logged as
[redacted]with no screenshot at all. - Work machine? Check your employer's policy first. On corporate devices the machine — and anything on it — may be subject to company monitoring rules.
The anti-pattern to avoid is cloud-first trackers where deletion means trusting a vendor's retention policy. Local capture makes the privacy question trivially auditable: open the folder; that's everything that exists.