Anyone who has shared a screenshot with an AI coding assistant has probably had that moment of panic: did I just send my API key to a cloud server?
Privacy Mask is a new open-source tool designed to solve exactly that problem. It sits between your screen and your AI tools, intercepting screenshots locally and automatically redacting sensitive patterns like API keys, phone numbers, and ID strings before they get sent anywhere.
The tool runs entirely on your machine. No cloud processing, no external calls. It pattern-matches against common secret formats and masks them in real time, so when your AI agent receives the screenshot, the sensitive data is already gone.
This fills a real gap. AI-powered coding assistants like Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot increasingly rely on screenshots for context during debugging sessions. Most developers are careful about not pasting secrets into chat, but screenshots are a blind spot. A terminal window might have environment variables visible. A browser tab might show an admin dashboard with customer IDs. Privacy Mask catches what humans miss.
The project is early-stage and looking for community feedback, but the core concept is sound. As AI agents gain more screen access through computer-use features, local interception layers like this will become a standard part of the developer security toolkit rather than a nice-to-have.