How to hide apps when screen sharing on a Mac

You're sharing your screen on a client call and a Slack DM slides in. Or a teammate's message. Or the browser tab you left open from the other customer. Everyone sees it. macOS gives you a few built-in ways to avoid this — and they all make you stop working. Here's the full menu, from free to frictionless.

The free options (and where they break)

• Close every app first. Works, until you need Slack to grab a link mid-demo — then you're re-opening the very thing you hid.
• Share a single window instead of the whole screen. Safer, but you can't switch apps, and menus/overlays can still spill outside it.
• Turn on Do Not Disturb / a Focus. Silences notification banners — but does nothing about an open DM, a visible inbox, or a tab title.
• Use a second monitor. Great if you have one; useless on a laptop at a coffee shop.

Why 'just be careful' isn't a plan

Every one of these depends on you remembering, every single time, under pressure, on camera. The most common line people say after a leak is some version of "I forgot to close it." A privacy setup that relies on a perfect human is not a privacy setup.

The approach that lets you keep working

ScreenVeil takes the opposite tack: leave everything open on your Mac, and shape what the audience sees. You pick the apps that should stay private — Slack, Messages, Mail, your password manager, other customers' tabs — and they're simply absent from the shared view, while staying open and usable for you.

It also auto-detects when a screen share or recording starts, so you get a reminder instead of relying on memory. Start it once with a hotkey and present normally.

The honest limit

No Mac app can hide your screen from every possible recorder — Apple doesn't expose a system-wide "don't capture this" API, and we won't pretend otherwise. What ScreenVeil does is give you a clean, controllable shared feed for the tools you actually present in (Zoom, Meet, Teams, Loom, OBS). That covers the situation where leaks actually happen: live, in front of an audience.