How to Hide an App or Window From Screen Share on Windows

You're about to share your screen and there's something on it you'd rather not broadcast — notes, a chat, a second browser, an assistant overlay. The good news: Windows gives you several ways to keep a window off a Zoom, Teams or Google Meet share. The bad news: most of them fail the moment you (or the interviewer) say "can you share your entire screen instead?"

Here are the four approaches, from simplest to most robust, and exactly where each one breaks.

1. Share a single window or tab instead of the entire screen

Every mainstream meeting app lets you choose what to share:

• Zoom: Share Screen → pick the app window under Basic, not "Screen".
• Microsoft Teams: Share → choose from the Window list rather than a Screen.
• Google Meet: Present now → A window or A tab instead of Your entire screen.

Only the chosen window is transmitted. Everything else — other apps, your taskbar, notifications — stays on your side.

Where it breaks: it relies on you choosing correctly every single time, and many technical interviewers specifically ask for a full-screen share so they can see your editor, terminal and browser together. Switch to an entire-screen share and everything visible goes out.

2. Use a second monitor and share only one display

If you have two displays, share only one and keep private windows on the other. The meeting app treats each monitor as a separate "screen", so the second one never enters the share.

Where it breaks: your eyes. On camera, repeatedly looking to one side is noticeable, and interviewers do pick up on it — we cover that in how interview cheating detection actually works. It also doesn't help on a single laptop screen.

3. Minimise or close it (the manual option)

The bluntest method: close or minimise the window before you share, and restore it afterwards. It works, but only for things you don't need during the share, which is usually exactly the part that matters.

4. The OS-level method: Windows capture exclusion

Since the Windows 10 May 2020 Update (version 2004), Windows supports a flag that tells its compositor to leave a specific window out of every capture of the screen:

// C++ / Win32
SetWindowDisplayAffinity(hwnd, WDA_EXCLUDEFROMCAPTURE);

With that flag set, the window is still drawn on your physical monitor — you can read it and work with it — but screen shares, window shares, recordings and most screenshot tools receive your screen without it. It isn't blacked out or blurred; it's simply absent, and whatever is underneath shows through. Because the exclusion happens inside Windows rather than inside Zoom or Teams, it doesn't matter which meeting app you use or whether you share one window or the whole desktop.

For developers, the same capability is exposed by frameworks:

// Electron: calls SetWindowDisplayAffinity under the hood on Windows
mainWindow.setContentProtection(true);

We go much deeper on the mechanics — the older WDA_MONITOR black-box behaviour, which capture paths honour the flag, and its limits — in how Windows screen capture exclusion actually works.

Where it breaks: the flag has to be set by the app that owns the window. There's no built-in Windows setting to right-click any window and make it invisible to capture — so this only helps with software built to use it. And it hides a window from software capture only: a phone camera pointed at your monitor still sees everything.

Which method should you use?

How to check what the other side sees

Never assume — test. Start a meeting on your own (or join from your phone as a second participant), share the way you plan to share in the real call, and look at what arrives. For a local check without a meeting, add a Display Capture source in OBS Studio: whatever OBS shows is roughly what a screen share transmits.

Related reading

• Do Zoom, Teams and Google Meet detect screen overlays?
• Stealth mode, layer by layer
• Online interview setup checklist