Is using Microsoft Hooks an ethical process for getting non sensitive Information

Question

So we have an application that I am not ready to describe in full before we take it to the market, but I will give the details necessary.

We currently have an application that takes a snapshot of an active window of a particular application based on a region that is selected by the user. This data is simply a number that is read using OCR and sends this number to a particular device for that device to display. It is much more complicated but this is the part that I want to ask about. Sometimes these different types of particular applications do not have an active window setup so if the user moves the window then we no longer can read that region with OCR unless they update the new region.

I have read into something known as microsoft hooks. Here is the link

My question here is this something that can be used at all and would it be ethical? We don't need access to any sensitive info but I myself am not sure if I should use this.

Im sorry the description of my software is very vague. We just don't have it fully protected yet so I don't want to just announce it. I only need some help seeing if hook can be used in this type of way.

Thanks

Answer 1

Microsoft Windows is built around hooks. Most of them are hidden behind their api but once your application becomes anything more then trivial you can't get around using hooks once in a while.

It's not a matter of ethics, it's just how windows is built.

To put it even stronger: a windows program that uses the windows ui can't work without using hooks.

The act of using hooks to interface with other programs can't be considered evil or not evil. It's what you do with your program that makes it evil or not.