How to hide a window from Zoom screen share on Windows

Share your entire screen in Zoom, and use an app that marks the private window as excluded from capture. Viewers get an opaque privacy screen where that window is, while it stays fully visible and usable in front of you. Windows has no built-in setting for this, and Zoom has no option for it either — it is done by the app that owns the window, using a Windows capture flag.

Hushglass, a Windows app that protects a chosen window from screen-share viewers only, does exactly this. Below is the whole procedure, the one setting that decides whether it works, and what to check when it does not.

Set it up, step by step

About five minutes, once. You can do this before a call or in the middle of one — protecting a window and starting a share are independent, and neither has to come first.

1. Install Hushglass. Download it and run the installer. It installs for your user account only, so there is no administrator prompt. Your browser and Windows may warn you about the file first, because it is not code signed yet; the download page shows exactly which warnings appear and publishes the file’s SHA-256 so you can confirm what you received.
2. Open the window you want kept private — the banking tab, the other client’s document, the chat. Open it before the next step, or you will have to refresh the list.
3. Open Hushglass. It lists the windows currently open, each with its own app icon, under two columns: ACTIVE WINDOWS and STATUS. Every row starts as Not Protected.
4. Click your window’s row once to select it. If it is not listed, click Refresh list at the bottom. The list does not update by itself, so anything opened after Hushglass started will be missing until you refresh.
5. Click Protect, bottom right. Double-clicking the row does the same thing. The STATUS cell becomes a green Protected chip. That is the confirmation — the flag is set on the window itself, immediately, with nothing to apply or save.
6. Start your share in Zoom. Click Share Screen in the meeting toolbar, choose the tile for your whole screen — usually labelled Screen 1 or Desktop 1, and simply Screen on a single-monitor PC — then click Share. Do not choose the tile for an individual application window. Exact labels shift between Zoom versions; the screen-versus-window distinction has not.
7. Leave Hushglass running. It can sit in the tray by the clock and protection continues. Closing it to the tray is the default behaviour; quitting it entirely releases the window.

The window then stays on your screen, in its usual place, fully usable, while viewers get a privacy screen where it is.

Learn the shortcut before you need it. Ctrl+Shift+Q protects or unprotects whichever window you are currently working in, from any application, without switching to Hushglass. That is the version of this you will actually use mid-call, because the moment you need it is rarely one you planned for.

The free tier protects one window at a time. It is not a trial and does not expire. Pro removes the limit and additionally picks up new windows opened by an app you have already protected — a chat app’s pop-out conversations, a browser’s separate dialogs — without you selecting each one.

The one thing that decides whether this works

You have to share your entire screen, not the single window.

Zoom gives you three share modes, and the difference matters more than any setting inside any app:

• Entire screen — everything on that display is captured as one image, and a protected window can be excluded from it. This is the mode this works in.
• A single window — Zoom captures that window’s own pixels directly. If you share the private window itself, Windows hands it straight to Zoom and nothing can get in between. No app can fix this, including this one.
• A portion of screen — behaves like entire-screen capture over a smaller region.

Sharing a different single window is inherently safe, because nothing else is being captured. The risk case is the one people actually use: entire screen, because they are moving between a browser, a deck and a terminal.

On two monitors, keep the private window on the display you are not sharing where you can. A window on an unshared display is never captured at all, which makes protection a second layer rather than the only one. When it has to live on the shared display, protection is what covers it.

What viewers see

An opaque privacy screen where the window is, carrying a small line naming the tool. It is not a blur of your content, because a blur is still your content — there is nothing in it to read, at any bitrate, on any zoom level, on a recording watched afterwards.

You keep seeing the real window. That is the whole point: minimising it, closing it or moving it to another virtual desktop hides it from you too, and then you cannot read the thing you were trying to keep private.

The same is true in Meet and Teams, and for the same reason: all of them receive one screen capture from Windows, and the protected window was taken out of it before any of them saw a pixel. Nothing about the result depends on which meeting app is running.

Tested, and on which Zoom

Viewer-side pass on 2026-08-16, on Zoom’s default capture mode, sharing an entire screen, with a second device joined to the call as the viewer. Checked on the viewer’s screen rather than on the sharing machine, because the sharing machine is the one place the result is guaranteed to look right whether or not it is.

Two Zoom-specific gaps, stated plainly:

• Zoom’s legacy capture mode is untested. It is an option some administrators still turn on, and it is the one path that might bypass the Windows flag this relies on. If your organisation manages your Zoom install, verify before trusting it.
• Everything here is Windows only. Zoom on macOS has no equivalent flag.

Google Meet, Microsoft Teams (desktop client), OBS Studio, ShareX, Clipchamp and Windows’ own capture were tested the same day and behave the same way. Teams in a browser tab was not, and is a separate path.

What this does not cover

Worth knowing before a call, not after one:

• Task View, Alt-Tab and taskbar previews leak. Windows draws those thumbnails itself and no application can change what they show. Do not open Task View while presenting.
• Notification pop-ups are their own windows. A message banner is not part of the window you protected, so turn on Focus assist for the call. On Pro, further windows opened by an already-protected app are picked up automatically; a banner raised by the Windows notification system is not one of those.
• Hardware capture sees everything. An HDMI capture card or a phone pointed at the monitor reads the screen itself, below the level any software operates at.
• Whole windows only. There is no way to protect one region inside a window and leave the rest visible.

Check it before you need it

Join a call from a second device — a phone is enough — share your entire screen, and look at the phone. Not at Zoom’s own self-preview, and not at a screenshot of your own desktop. The viewer’s screen is the only readout that answers the question, and it takes about a minute.

Do this once with non-sensitive content on screen. Then you know, rather than hoping.

If it is not working

In rough order of how often each turns out to be the actual cause:

• Viewers can still read the window. You almost certainly shared that window as a single window rather than sharing the screen. Stop the share, click Share Screen again, and pick the whole screen tile.
• The window is not in the list. Click Refresh list. Anything opened after Hushglass started will not appear until you do.
• The row still reads Not Protected. The click selected nothing, or selected a neighbouring row. Click the row so it highlights, then click Protect; the cell should become a green Protected chip.
• Protecting a second window appeared to do nothing. The free tier holds one protected window at a time.
• Viewers can see the Hushglass window itself. Open settings and turn on Keep Hushglass invisible to viewers.
• A pop-up from the protected app is still visible. Free protects the single window you picked; Pro follows that app’s other windows on its own.
• Ctrl+Shift+Q does nothing. Another application registered that combination first. Hushglass says so in a notification at startup when it happens, and protecting from the window list is unaffected.

If none of those is it, suspect the capture path: a managed Zoom install running legacy capture mode, or a Windows build older than 10 version 2004, which does not have the flag this relies on at all.