Screen watching is switched off by default. If you switch it on, OCTOVO reads your screen’s text offline, keeps password managers, banking and login pages locked out, and lets nothing leave unchecked.
Off this is how it is when you install OCTOVO
Screen
“Send the link from yesterday.”
There are sentences no program can answer if it only knows your mailbox. “Yesterday’s Amazon link with the dishwasher” is in no file, no email and no bookmark — it was on your screen for one minute.
If you switch watching on, OCTOVO looks at the screen at intervals, reads out the text and files it. No video, by default no image. Afterwards it can find again what you saw.
This ability is the only one in the whole program that has to be switched on explicitly again after setup. That is deliberate.
What it costs
The sentence we don’t leave out
What it reads expires after seven days. The password manager it never reads.
What you give up
While it is on, OCTOVO reads along with whatever is on your screen during that time. Not only what you meant to show it — everything that isn’t blocked.
The moment you ask about it, the matching excerpt travels to the language model as part of the question. That is the point where screen content leaves your device — which is why it stands here and not in the small print.
What stands against it
- Never read:
- Password managers, banking pages, login pages, private windows — and anything you add.
- Read offline:
- Text recognition runs entirely on your device. The image is discarded afterwards.
- Defused:
- Card numbers, IBANs, keys and confirmation codes are thrown out before anything is filed.
- Encrypted:
- The text lives in the same encrypted file as everything else.
- Visible:
- While reading is on, the menu-bar icon carries a dot and the words “Screen is being read”.
The rule above it all
Whatever comes of screen content never leaves unchecked — not even on autopilot.
You see the message before it goes. That is not a setting, it is built in.
The credentials live only here, on your device.
- Retention
- Preset to 7 days, adjustable between 1 and 90. After that the text expires on its own.
- Blocked areas
- The block list is out in the open, and you can add any further program.
- Forget the last hour
- One click deletes immediately — the text it read as well as the search index for it.
- Pause
- Sits at the very top of the menu-bar icon while reading is on.
- Forget everything
- Clears the entire screen memory without touching the rest of OCTOVO.
Two cases where it isn’t up to you alone: on a work device, watching is not permitted without a works-council agreement (§ 87 Abs. 1 Nr. 6 BetrVG). In professions bound to confidentiality (§ 203 StGB) it is locked and has to be released individually.
The screen chain, station by station Why nothing leaves here without approval