How to Hide Notifications, Tabs and Sensitive Info When You Share Your Screen
Most screen-share leaks come from notifications, open tabs, autocomplete and the data in the tool you are demoing. This guide gives the exact settings that hide notifications on Mac, Windows, Zoom and Teams, how to hide your tabs, and how to blur what has to stay on screen.
The short version
To hide notifications when screen sharing, turn on Do Not Disturb (Windows) or a Focus (Mac) before the call. On a Mac you can also set System Settings > Notifications to turn notifications off whenever you share the display, and in Zoom you can turn on “Silence system notifications when sharing desktop”. To hide your tabs, share a single browser tab instead of the whole screen. For sensitive data that has to stay on screen, blur it on the page before you share, and use a solid box over passwords and keys in screenshots you publish.
- Most screen-share leaks come from notifications, open tabs, autocomplete and the window behind the one you meant to show.
- macOS, Windows, Zoom and Teams each have a setting that silences notifications while you share. Turn them on once and you don’t have to remember before every call.
- Sharing one tab hides your other tabs and the rest of your screen, and every major meeting app supports sharing a tab or a single window.
- An on-page blur is enough for a call or a recording, because viewers only receive video. For published images, cover secrets with a solid box.
Contents
Clicking “Share screen” shows everyone in the call whatever is on your display at that moment. That can include open tabs, a chat notification, a customer's details in a CRM or a bookmark folder you'd rather keep to yourself. Usually nobody notices, but anyone in the call can take a screenshot.
This guide covers how to hide notifications and tabs when screen sharing, with the exact settings for macOS, Windows, Zoom and Teams, and how to hide data that has to stay on screen. I make a Chrome extension for that last part, Blurr.ing, which I describe further down. The first steps don't need it.
What leaks when you share your screen #
Most screen-share leaks come from ordinary things that happen to be on screen:
- Notifications from chat, calendar or banking apps, appearing in a corner of the screen.
- Other tabs and windows. Tab titles can say a lot, and switching windows during a demo shows whatever is behind.
- Autocomplete. Typing in the address bar or a search box brings up your history.
- The data you are presenting, such as real customer names, emails, invoices or API keys in the tool you are demoing.
The last kind can be costly. In a widely reported 2022 case, an engineer who had moved from Valeo to Nvidia shared his screen in a meeting with Valeo. When he minimized his slides, Valeo source code was visible, Valeo staff took a screenshot, and the company sued Nvidia for theft of trade secrets. The meeting software can fail too. A 2021 Zoom vulnerability, CVE-2021-28133, could briefly show other participants the contents of windows that had not been shared.
How to hide notifications when screen sharing #
Each of these settings takes a minute to change, and most of them then work on every call without you having to remember.
On a Mac
- Open System Settings > Notifications and find the option for notifications when mirroring or sharing the display. Set it to Notifications Off. macOS then hides notifications automatically whenever your screen is being shared.
- For anything that slips through, turn on a Focus such as Do Not Disturb from Control Center before the call.
On Windows 11
- Open the notification center (Win + N) and select the bell icon to turn on Do Not Disturb. Banners stop and notifications go straight to the notification center until you turn it off.
- Under Settings > System > Notifications you can also turn Do Not Disturb on automatically, for example during set hours or when you duplicate your display.
In Zoom
In the Zoom desktop app, go to Settings > Share Screen and turn on “Silence system notifications when sharing desktop”. Some apps still get through, so keep the system setting above switched on as well.
In Teams and Outlook
Teams sets your status to Do not disturb while you share your screen, which silences its own chat and call notifications. The option is under Settings > Privacy, “Set my status to Do not disturb when I’m sharing my screen”, and it is on by default. Outlook and other desktop apps notify through Windows, so Windows Do Not Disturb covers them.
In Chrome
Since 2021, Chrome hides the content of web notifications while you share your screen. That covers sites like Gmail. It doesn't cover notifications from the operating system or desktop apps, which is why the settings above still matter.
How to hide tabs when screen sharing #
If what you are presenting is in the browser, share one Chrome tab. Viewers then see that tab only, without your other tabs, your desktop, pop-up notifications or a window you switch to by mistake. Of everything in this guide, this change prevents the most leaks.
Google Meet asks whether to present a tab, a window or your entire screen, and while you share a tab Chrome shows a “Share this tab instead” button for moving the share to another tab without stopping. Desktop apps such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams list windows rather than tabs, so put what you are presenting in its own browser window and share that window instead of the whole screen. Sharing a Chrome tab also sends the tab's audio, so videos play sound for everyone.
Sometimes you have to share the whole screen, for example to switch between a browser and a desktop app. Your tab titles are then visible to everyone. Blurr.ing's Tab Privacy (covered below) masks tab titles and favicons for that case, and there is a separate guide on hiding tab titles during a screen share.
The two-minute pre-share checklist #
- Turn on Do Not Disturb (Focus on Windows and macOS) to silence system and app notifications during the call.
- Close what you don't need. A separate Chrome profile for demos, with no personal bookmarks, history or accounts, saves doing this every time.
- Hide the bookmarks bar. Folder names are small but readable.
- Open the pages you will show before the call starts, so you don't type into an address bar that autocompletes from your history.
- Check what others will see with a dry run or a screen share test.
- Blur anything sensitive that has to stay on screen (next section).
A longer version, with notes for Zoom, Meet, Teams and Slack huddles, is in the screen share privacy checklist.
How to blur sensitive information on a web page #
The checklist deals with what is around the content you're showing, not the content itself. If you are demoing a CRM or presenting an inbox, the sensitive data is the thing on screen. For that you need to hide parts of the page, which is what Blurr.ing does. It is a Chrome extension that blurs parts of any web page before you share, record or screenshot it.
Press Ctrl + Shift + Y (Cmd + Shift + Y on a Mac) to show the toolbar, then choose a method:
| Method | How it works | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Area blur | Drag a box over part of the page. You can move or resize it later. | A sidebar, a chart, a corner of a dashboard |
| Element blur | Hover to see an outline of what will be covered, then click. | A table row, a message, a profile card |
| Text blur | Select text and blur only the selection. The layout doesn't move. | A single name or number in a sentence |
| Blur Text presets | 34 detectors find patterns and blur every match. | Emails, phone numbers, card numbers, IBANs, API keys, IP addresses |
| Auto Blur | Blurs every image, video, avatar or ad on a page, a site or everywhere. | Profile photos and thumbnails in social and CRM tools |
| Tab Privacy | Masks tab titles and favicons, with 17 disguise styles. | Full-screen shares where the tab strip is visible |
Blurs stay in place in single-page apps that re-render as you click, such as Gmail, LinkedIn, Notion, Jira and Salesforce, and they also work inside same-origin iframes and open shadow DOM. There is a walkthrough of how to blur part of a web page, and guides for blurring Gmail during a screen share and hiding API keys in a live demo.
Can blurred or pixelated text be recovered? #
It depends on whether you are sharing live or publishing an image.
Live calls and recordings
People watching a screen share, stream or recording receive video. They can't inspect your page, scroll it or remove the blur, so blurred content stays hidden from them.
The blur is drawn on top of the page, and the text is still underneath it. Someone using your computer could switch the blur off or read the text in developer tools. That is acceptable for a meeting, but a blur won't protect data from the person sitting at the keyboard.
Images you publish
A published screenshot is a different case, because anyone who has the file can work on it for as long as they like. Pixelated and lightly blurred text has been recovered more than once: a 2016 paper at PoPETs showed it, the open-source Depix tool does it, and Bishop Fox's Unredacter solved a public pixelation challenge. Bishop Fox recommends solid black bars for any text that matters.
A blur is fine for things like an avatar or a customer name in a support screenshot. Passwords, API keys, tokens and account numbers need a solid box. If a real secret was visible in a share or a published image, rotate it, since hiding it afterwards doesn't undo the leak. There is more on the research in can blurred text be unblurred?, and the free image redaction tool adds solid boxes to an existing image in your browser without uploading it.
Screenshots and recordings #
Blurs you add to a page also appear in anything else you capture from it, whether that's a Loom recording, an OBS stream or a screenshot.
Blurr.ing also has its own capture tool. Press Ctrl + Shift + S (Cmd + Shift + S on a Mac) and drag a selection or capture the visible page, and the blurs are part of the image. Redactions you draw on the capture discard detail before blurring, which makes them harder to reverse than a plain blur, but secrets should still get a solid box. You can add a background, padding or a border, then copy the image or save it as PNG, JPEG or WebP. It is created in your browser and isn't uploaded. The guide to blurring screenshots has more detail.
Data, permissions and pricing #
Your blurs and the list of blurred pages are stored locally in your browser. No page content, URLs or screenshots are sent anywhere. The extension sends anonymous first-party product events to its own server and uses no third-party trackers. An account is optional and only syncs settings. To blur pages, the extension needs access to them, and the security page lists each permission and what it is for.
Every blur you draw by hand is free and unlimited, on every site, with no account. Free blurs last until you leave or reload the page, and the screenshot tool and Tab Privacy come with free tries. Premium costs $5 a month, $29 a year or $39 once. It restores your blurs before the page appears on every visit, and adds saved Auto Blur and Blur Text rules, blur strength, Reveal on hover and unlimited screenshots. You can cancel anytime, in one click. Blurr.ing runs in Chrome, Edge, Brave and Arc, and you can install it from the Chrome Web Store.
Sources #
The factual claims above were checked against primary documentation rather than against other articles. Here is where each one comes from, so you can verify it yourself.
- Apple Support: Change Notifications settings on Mac: documents the setting that turns notifications off when mirroring or sharing the display.
- Microsoft Support: Notifications and Do Not Disturb in Windows: documents turning on Do Not Disturb from the notification center, manually or automatically.
- Microsoft Support: Change your status in Microsoft Teams: documents the Do not disturb status and what it silences.
- Engadget: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets after screensharing blunder showed rival company’s code: reports the Valeo lawsuit that followed source code being visible during a video-call screen share.
- NIST National Vulnerability Database: CVE-2021-28133: documents that Zoom through 5.5.4 could briefly show the contents of windows that were explicitly not shared.
- Google Meet Help: Share your screen in Google Meet: documents sharing a tab, a window or the entire screen, and the “Share this tab instead” switch.
- Google Workspace Updates: Better privacy when screen sharing in Chrome: announces that Chrome hides the content of web notifications while you share your screen.
- Bishop Fox: Unredacter, and why you should never use pixelation for redaction: demonstrates recovering pixelated text and recommends solid black bars for redaction.
- Depix: recovering plaintext from pixelized screenshots: the open-source proof of concept for reversing pixelated text in screenshots.
- Hill et al., On the (In)effectiveness of Mosaicing and Blurring as Tools for Document Redaction (PoPETs 2016): peer-reviewed research showing mosaiced and blurred text can be recovered.