How to hide sensitive data during a demo or screen share

Sales engineers, support agents and trainers share their screen from the real product every day, because the demo account never has interesting data in it. The moment the call starts, so does the risk: a customer list in the sidebar, an invoice with a card number, an email address in the account menu, a Slack notification sliding in from the corner.

Here is what actually works, in order of how much preparation each option needs.

1. Prepare a clean profile (5 minutes, works forever)

Most leaks in a shared screen come from the browser, not from the app you are demoing.

• Create a separate Chrome profile used only for demos: no bookmarks bar with internal tools, no signed-in personal accounts, no extension icons that reveal what you use.
• Turn off system notifications entirely (Focus / Do Not Disturb) rather than trusting yourself to close them.
• Share a single tab or window, never the whole screen. In Meet, Zoom and Teams that option is one click away and it removes the whole desktop from the picture.
• Close other tabs: tab titles are readable in a shared window and routinely say more than the page does.

2. Black out what is on the page, before you share

Cleaning the browser does not clean the data inside the app. If the account you are demoing has real customers in it, you have three options: fake the data, hide the elements, or cover them.

Hide elements with DevTools

Right-click an element → Inspect, then press H with the node selected to hide it, or edit the text directly in the Elements panel. Nothing is saved server-side; a reload restores everything. It is free and precise, and it is slow: every reload during the call undoes your work, and hidden elements can shift the layout in ways that look broken on camera.

Cover them with a redaction extension

Cloakshot was built for screenshots, but the covering step happens on the live page, which makes it useful here: press Alt+Shift+M and click any element or word to drop a solid black box over it. The boxes stay on the page while you talk, they survive scrolling, and they look deliberate rather than broken. Press Escape or reload when the call ends.

For a whole page of customer data, the automatic pass covers the usual suspects in one shot: emails, phone numbers, card numbers, national IDs, API keys and IP addresses.

Use a CSS filter for whole regions

If you are comfortable in DevTools, adding filter: blur(6px) to a container blurs an entire panel. It reads well on a call and it is one line. Do not use it for anything you would not want recovered from a recording, though — blur is reversible in ways a solid box is not, and recordings live longer than calls. More on that here.

3. Recordings need more care than live calls

A live demo is seen once by people who were already in the room. A recording is forwarded, uploaded to a shared drive, transcribed, and sometimes published. Treat anything you record as public:

• Redact before recording, not in post-production. Editing a video is expensive, and the raw file usually survives somewhere.
• Watch for data that appears only briefly: autocomplete dropdowns, toast notifications, the tab title while a page loads, a customer name in a browser alert.
• If your tool has a "presenter mode" or demo data mode, this is the one situation where it is worth the setup cost.

4. What to cover, in practice

Region	What people forget
Account menu / avatar	Your work email, the org name, the plan you are on
Lists and tables	The rows you are not talking about — they are all real customers
Search and filters	Recent searches, saved filters named after a client
Invoices and billing	Card last four, billing address, tax IDs
Logs and API panels	Bearer tokens, webhook secrets, internal hostnames
URL bar	Customer IDs and session tokens in query strings

5. The rule that survives a busy week

Any process that depends on remembering will fail on the day the call starts late. Pick a default that works when you are rushed: share one tab, notifications off, and a keyboard shortcut that covers the obvious data in one pass. Everything else is a bonus.