What your interviewer sees when you share your screen
Pick your meeting app, your operating system and what you are sharing. You get a straight answer about what lands in the capture and what does not — including the parts that stay visible no matter what you do.
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Zoom · macOS · Entire screen
Everything on that display, for as long as you share it — including anything that pops up later.
Zoom's desktop app shares screens, windows and app portions. It has no browser-tab option — you only get that if you run Zoom itself in a browser. What actually reaches the other side is decided by your operating system and by the surface you picked — not by which meeting app is carrying it. Where an app genuinely differs, it is called out below.
The link carries your three choices, so it opens on exactly this answer.
What reaches the other side
Not capturedIn our code
The Craqly overlay window
Excluded from the capture at the window-server level.
Craqly calls Electron's setContentProtection(true) on its overlay, which on macOS sets the window's sharingType to NSWindowSharingNone. The window server then omits that window from any screen capture — the meeting app never receives those pixels, so this does not depend on Zoom, Meet, Teams or Webex behaving in a particular way. Stealth is on by default: a new install ships with screenShareVisible set to false, and ⌘⇧M toggles it. If you have toggled it off, the overlay is an ordinary window and is captured like any other.
All of it, continuously, not just what was there when you started.
Sharing a whole display sends that display. Every window you open, move or alt-tab to during the call is in the stream, and so is anything that appears on its own — a calendar alert, a Slack toast, a message preview, a download banner, a low-battery warning. On macOS that also means the menu bar and the Dock, including whatever menu-bar apps you run.
In the captureIn our code
Your mouse cursor
Captured. This is the tell that catches people out.
The pointer is drawn by the operating system into the capture, and no window-level exclusion can remove it. This matters more than it sounds: an invisible window does not make your cursor invisible, so a pointer that hovers, drags or changes shape over an apparently empty patch of desktop is a louder signal than the window would have been. Craqly's own resize grips deliberately keep the ordinary arrow cursor for exactly this reason — a resize arrow floating over nothing is conspicuous.
A notification is a window the OS draws on top of the display you are sharing, so it is in the stream along with its preview text. Turn on a Focus mode before the call; macOS also offers a per-notification setting to hide previews. This is the single most common way people leak something during a screen share, and it has nothing to do with the meeting app.
In the captureIn our code
The Dock and menu bar
Both are captured — but Craqly is not in either.
An entire-display share includes the Dock and the menu bar, so your open apps are effectively listed for the other side. Craqly calls app.dock.hide() at startup, so it has no Dock icon and does not appear in the ⌘-Tab switcher, and setHiddenInMissionControl keeps it out of Mission Control. What the Dock does show is every other app you have open.
craqly-desktop/electron/main.ts
In the capturePlatform behaviour
The macOS screen-recording indicator
Visible in the menu bar — but it is already lit by the meeting app.
macOS shows one indicator whenever any app is capturing the screen. Craqly needs Screen Recording permission because that is how it reads your computer's audio, so it does light that indicator while a session runs. The nuance that matters: the meeting app is capturing too the moment you start sharing, so the indicator is on regardless of whether Craqly is running. It reports that something is recording, not what. The list of apps behind it is on your own machine, not in the video stream. In an entire-display share the indicator itself is inside the captured frame, exactly as it would be for anyone sharing their screen with no other software running.
DependsPlatform behaviour
A second physical monitor
Only the display you picked is sent — so picking the right one is on you.
The picker lists every display and sends exactly one. The failure is human, not technical: choosing the wrong display, dragging something onto the shared one mid-call, or running the displays mirrored, which makes both show the same thing and defeats the whole arrangement. Worth saying plainly — a second monitor does not hide anything by itself, and where you point your eyes is the loudest signal in any of this.
Not capturedPlatform behaviour
What Zoom tells the host about you
Not which apps you are running, and not which window has focus.
None of the mainstream meeting apps report the host a list of your running applications or tell them when you switch windows. Zoom used to have an attendee attention-tracking feature that flagged when its window lost focus for 30 seconds; Zoom removed it in April 2020 and it has not come back. What a host does see is what you share, your camera, your microphone, and the meeting app's own participant metadata. Dedicated proctoring suites are an entirely different category and are outside what this page covers.
DependsPlatform behaviour
Your computer's audio
Only if you tick the share-sound option.
Sharing a screen does not share your system audio unless you turn that on — it is "Share sound" in Zoom, "Share tab audio"/"Share system audio" in Chrome for Meet, and "Include computer sound" in Teams. If you do turn it on, anything your machine plays goes down the same pipe, including audio from apps you are not sharing the picture of. Your microphone is separate and is governed by whether you are muted.
How to read the labels
Every claim on this page carries one of four labels. A page like this is only worth anything if you can tell which parts we can prove, so the weakest label is on the claims we have not tested ourselves rather than quietly absent.
In our code
Traceable to a named mechanism in the Craqly desktop source. The file is cited on the finding.
We tested it
We ran it against a real screen capture and observed the result, on the platform named in the finding.
Platform behaviour
Documented behaviour of the operating system or the meeting app. We did not build it and cannot prove it from our source, so treat a vendor update as able to change it.
Not verified by us
We believe this is true but have not run it ourselves. Usually because it is Windows-specific and we do not have a Windows machine.
What nothing can hide
Window-level exclusion is a compositor flag. It is precise about what it covers, and these fall outside it.
Your mouse cursor
Drawn into the capture by the OS. A pointer moving with purpose over apparently empty desktop is more conspicuous than a visible window would be.
A camera pointed at your screen
Content protection is a compositor flag. A phone on a stand, a webcam over your shoulder or a hardware capture box between your machine and a monitor sees the panel, and none of this applies.
Where you are looking
Reading something off to one side, on a second monitor or elsewhere on the same screen, is visible on your camera. This is the tell people actually notice, and no software setting changes it.
Anything you type or paste into the shared surface
Text you paste into a shared window or tab is part of that window. The exclusion covers the overlay, not your clipboard.
A proctored exam
Remote-proctoring suites install their own agents and monitor at a level ordinary meeting apps do not. This page is about understanding an ordinary screen share. It is not a guide to defeating monitored exams, and we will not write one.
How we check this instead of assuming it
We do not take the operating system's word for it. There is an automated harness that drives a real screen capture and checks the pixels.
1
The app boots in a special canary mode with two full-screen markers: a magenta window that has content protection turned on exactly the way the real overlay does, and a cyan control window that does not.
2
A real Chrome instance is driven to capture the entire screen through the same getDisplayMedia path a browser-based meeting app uses.
3
The captured frame is pixel-counted. Magenta present means the exclusion failed. Cyan absent means the capture itself did not work, so the run is reported inconclusive rather than passing — a black frame must never be able to look like a pass.
The honest caveat: This runs on macOS. The same harness has never been run on Windows because we do not have a Windows machine, which is why every Windows-specific claim on this page is marked as not verified by us.
⌘⇧M toggles it, and the state is remembered between runs. A new install starts with it on, but if you switched it off to show someone the app, it stays off until you switch it back.
Recording instead of live sharing
Screen recording and live sharing use the same capture path, so a window excluded from one is excluded from the other. What changes is permanence: a cloud recording keeps whatever it captured, and you cannot take it back.
An operating-system or client update
Capture APIs change. macOS moved to ScreenCaptureKit; Windows moved to the Graphics Capture API. A future release could change how exclusions are honoured, which is why we re-run the canary rather than assuming last quarter's result still holds.
Mirrored displays or the wrong display
Mirroring makes your second screen show the first. Picking the wrong display in the share dialog sends the one you meant to keep to yourself. Both are configuration mistakes, and both are common.
A virtual machine or remote-desktop session
If your session is being rendered on someone else's hardware or streamed through remote-desktop software, the capture happens somewhere else in the stack and window-level exclusion on your machine is not in the path.
What this page is for. Understanding what an ordinary screen share transmits, so you can decide what to put on your screen. It is not a guide to defeating remote proctoring or a monitored exam, and we have deliberately not written one. If you are in a process that requires proctoring software, assume it sees substantially more than anything described here.