Before you hit Share
Everything to check before you share your screen
A screen share transmits whatever is on your machine, and you cannot un-share what a dozen people already saw. These nine checks take about five minutes, and each one closes a leak the others cannot.
- Nine checks, five minutes
- Works for Zoom, Meet & Teams
- Honest about the limits
Updated August 2026
Quick answer
The single highest-impact change is sharing one tab instead of your whole screen. That choice alone hides your address bar, bookmarks, tab strip, notifications and every other window, because none of them are part of the tab. The rest of the checklist closes what tab sharing cannot: the notification settings that live in your OS, the tab strip you sometimes have to show, and the sensitive data inside the page itself, which is the part Blurr.ing handles.
The checklist
Nine checks, in the order that catches the most
Work top to bottom. The first two are decided before the call ever starts; the rest you can do with the meeting lobby already open.
- 1
Share one tab, not your whole screen
This is the single highest-impact change you can make. A shared tab shows only the page inside it: no address bar, no bookmarks, no tab strip, no desktop, and an OS notification that pops over your screen is not part of the tab, so viewers never see it. Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams all offer it in the share picker.
- 2
Turn on Do Not Disturb before the call, not during
No browser extension can suppress OS notifications; silencing them is an operating system setting. Turn on Focus on macOS or Do Not Disturb on Windows before you join, because the first Slack toast tends to arrive while you are still fumbling with the share picker. Even on a tab share, where viewers cannot see the toast, the ping still derails you.
- 3
Close or park everything unrelated
Quit the apps that like to surface themselves: chat, mail, calendar reminders. Anything that can steal focus can put itself on screen the moment you share a window or your whole display. An app you closed cannot.
- 4
Present from a separate browser profile or window
A fresh Chrome profile has its own history, autofill, bookmarks and tabs, so nothing personal can surface while you type or search. Even a plain second window helps: keep the presentation tabs in one window and everything else in another, and the wrong tab is never one click away.
- 5
Clean up or mask your tab strip
If you must share a window, the tab strip goes with it, and tab titles read like a diary: your bank, your job search, a doctor. Close what you can, then let Tab Privacy mask the remaining titles and favicons with one of 17 disguise styles. Free covers three activations.
- 6
Blur the sensitive data inside the page
Tab sharing hides everything around the page but nothing inside it, and the page is where the salaries, customer emails and revenue figures live. With Blurr.ing you draw a box over any region, click an element, or select a run of text, free and unlimited. For data that repeats, one keyword rule sweeps every match at once.
- 7
Check autofill and the address bar
Typing in a shared address bar replays your history as suggestions, one keystroke at a time. Navigate before you share, keep the destination in a bookmark, or paste the full URL in one go. Form autofill deserves the same suspicion: a click on an email field can drop your real address into a demo.
- 8
Rehearse the scroll path
On a dashboard or spreadsheet the leak is rarely the first screen; it is two scrolls down, in the row you forgot about. Walk the exact path you will present once before the call and blur what you pass on the way. A pinned blur (Premium) stays put over a sticky column while everything else scrolls.
- 9
Have an exit plan
Decide in advance what happens after the demo: stop sharing first, then switch contexts. The classic leak is answering “can you pull up X?” with the share still live, sailing through your inbox on the way. Stop the share, find X, share again. Ten seconds of black beats a screenshot you cannot take back.
Open the toolbar on any page with Ctrl + Shift + Y (Cmd + Shift + Y on Mac).
The honest boundary
What a browser extension can and cannot hide
An extension lives inside the web page. Everything in the page is fair game; everything outside it belongs to the operating system and the share picker. Knowing which is which is most of screen share privacy.
Inside the page: yes
- Any region of the page: draw a box over it, precise to the pixel
- Any element: a table cell, a card, an avatar, a whole embedded frame
- Any run of text, or every match of a keyword across the page
- Whole categories at once: images, videos, SVG icons and ads, with Auto Blur
- Your tab titles and favicons, with Tab Privacy
Outside the page: no
- OS notifications: no extension can suppress or cover them
- Your desktop, dock, taskbar or wallpaper
- Other applications and their windows
- The address bar, bookmarks and browser chrome around the page
- Anything outside the browser page, on any monitor you share
For everything in the “no” column, the fixes are items one and two of the checklist: share a tab, and silence notifications in the OS itself. And a privacy note on the “yes” column: the blurs you draw stay entirely on your device, and the extension ships no third-party trackers.
Keep exploring
Now blur the page you are about to present
The checklist handles the frame around the page. These guides handle what is in it.
Related guides
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