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Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

(peabee.substack.com)
1192 points gniting | 2 comments | 29 Mar 25 21:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.468s | source
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cheschire ◴[29 Mar 25 23:43 UTC] No.43519772[source]▶
Can windows apps (not installed from the MS store) enumerate through the window titles of all open windows? How hard would it be for an app to monitor all of your web traffic based on the title alone?

Legit question. ChatGPT isn't super helpful here since it agrees with everything when I'm really looking for someone to say why this isn't really feasible in the real world.

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1. edoceo ◴[29 Mar 25 23:47 UTC] No.43519798[source]▶
Yep, not difficult at all.

This prompt got me some mostly looks OK Python

> Can you make a simple windows program that will get all the window titles from active programs running

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2. halfcat ◴[30 Mar 25 00:56 UTC] No.43520177[source]▶
Definitely possible. This is how chat bots worked on AOL in the 90’s, basically the FindWindow and FindWindowEx functions in the win32 API. Hasn’t changed much (if any) since then.