screenpipe-menubar

A privacy-first, one-command setup for screenpipe 24/7 screen memory on macOS, plus a native menu bar control.

screenpipe captures your screen continuously and makes it searchable with OCR. That is powerful and also a standing liability: keys, seed phrases, and banking screens flow past the recorder all day. This repo packages a hardened capture profile that excludes password managers / crypto wallets / banking windows, redacts PII on-device, never persists typed or copied text, encrypts at rest, and ships a small tool to scrub residual secrets from the local index. The end state: redacted screen memory you can actually trust, behind one install command and one permission grant.

Status: early. Slice 1 (shell backend + installer) is landing first; the native Swift menu bar app is slice 2. The roadmap lives in the author's ops monorepo.

What is in here

bin/screenpipe-capture   hardened `screenpipe record` launcher (the privacy profile)
bin/screenpipe-ctl       start | stop | pause <min> | resume (LaunchAgent-aware)
bin/scrub-elements.py    redact residual secrets from screenpipe's `elements` table
patterns/                bundled secret-detection patterns (provider regexes + BIP-39)
config.example           tunables: retention, languages, extra excluded windows

The privacy profile

bin/screenpipe-capture runs screenpipe record with:

• App/window exclusions for 1Password, Bitwarden, KeePassXC, Ledger Live, Trezor Suite, Electrum, Exodus, MetaMask, Phantom, Rabby, "Recovery Phrase", and banking windows by title. Extend via SCREENPIPE_EXTRA_IGNORED_WINDOWS in your config.
• On-device PII redaction (--use-pii-removal --pii-backend local), async so it never blocks capture, covering secrets, people, emails, phones, addresses, IDs, SSNs, cards, IBANs.
• No typed/clipboard persistence (--disable-keyboard-capture --disable-clipboard-capture).
• DRM-aware pause (--pause-on-drm-content) so protected video is not recorded.
• Encryption at rest via FileVault (turn it on; screenpipe stores under ~/.screenpipe).
• No telemetry (--disable-telemetry).
• A quiet performance profile (input-latency priority, capture debounce, low video quality) so 24/7 capture stays cheap.

scrub-elements.py

screenpipe's async redactor reconciles OCR / accessibility / UI-event text but not the per-element elements table, so a secret can linger there in plaintext. This tool finds and overwrites those residuals using the bundled patterns/ set. It prints counts only, never the matched value, and is idempotent.

python3 bin/scrub-elements.py --dry-run   # report counts, no writes
python3 bin/scrub-elements.py             # redact in place

Install

The one-command installer arrives in the next slice. Until then, see config.example and the scripts in bin/.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.