Reference Guide

What StealthShare hides, and what it honestly cannot.

Screen-sharing privacy tools are easy to oversell. This page walks through every part of StealthShare — what Privacy Mode actually hides, how each mechanism works, and the places where macOS imposes limits worth knowing about before you rely on it.

01Privacy Mode — the master switch

One switch, five ways to flip it.

Turning it on

The switch at the top of the menu-bar popover, the Protect Now button, the global hotkey (⌘⇧P by default), the switch in the Control Panel, or automatically — by live detection or your calendar.

Turning it off

Everything it changed is put back exactly as it was — and the same happens if you quit the app or it crashes (the wallpaper is restored on next launch). Automatic arming only ever disarms what it armed itself: it never turns off a session you turned on.

Always reachable

A crowded or notched menu bar makes macOS silently drop status items, so StealthShare also sits in the Dock and ⌘-Tab. The Dock icon opens the Control Panel, which has its own Privacy Mode switch.

02What gets hidden

Separate mechanisms, each independently toggleable — all on by default.

Desktop icons and widgets

Covered by a full-screen frosted surface rather than moved, so nothing is reorganised on your desktop.

Studio backdrop

Your wallpaper is swapped for a neutral backdrop while sharing and restored afterwards.

Confidential app blurring

A list of apps whose windows are covered by a blur mask. Switched on out of the box: Slack, WhatsApp, Mail, Messages, Signal, Telegram, 1Password, Bitwarden, KeePassXC and Apple Passwords. Included but switched off: Safari, Notes and Spotify. Every entry is yours to switch off or delete, you can add any installed app, and edits apply immediately — even mid-call. A listed app stays covered even when you click it, so bringing your password manager to the front never reveals it.

Present Mode

Covers every background window, listed or not, so only the window you are working in stays readable. Click another window and the clear one follows you — unless that app is on the blur list. It closes the gap the list leaves: an app you never added.

Peek — ⌘⇧E

Reveals the front window for 8 seconds, then covers it again by itself. Works on a listed app too, and the hotkey is editable.

Worth knowing: A masked window is covered for everyone, including you — macOS cannot draw one image to your display and a different one to a capture. ⌘⇧E is the escape hatch. And blurring matches the owning app, not individual windows: listing Safari covers every Safari window, not only private ones, which is why it ships off.

03Accidental-Paste Guard

The feature that catches the mistake you make while talking.

What it blocks

A ⌘V of anything that looks like an API key, a token, a card number, a private key or a password, while Privacy Mode is on.

Overriding it

A red warning flash — on your screen only, never in the shared feed. Press ⌘V again within 4 seconds to paste anyway. This is the one feature that needs the Accessibility permission.

04Notifications and Do Not Disturb

Holding back the banners.

Hold notifications

Banners are held while sharing. Afterwards you get a count and which apps they came from — never what they said.

Do Not Disturb

Controlled through two Shortcuts you create yourself — StealthShare DND On and Off. It is done this way because macOS offers apps no other public way to turn a Focus on.

05Auto-detection

Arming itself when something is genuinely capturing — on by default.

What it watches

Once a second it checks what the hardware is actually doing. Microphone live and camera live arm Privacy Mode in about a second. Screen being shared or recorded takes about 10 seconds: macOS keeps its recording light on for a few seconds after any capture, including a single screenshot, so the light has to stay on for 10 seconds before it counts. That delay only matters when you share muted with the camera off.

What never counts

A meeting app merely being open — Slack and Zoom sit open all day. Playing audio, even through a headset that reports itself as in use. Detection does not care which app is capturing; the app list only changes the label you see ("Zoom" instead of "Microphone in use"), never whether you are protected.

Worth knowing: Joined, muted, camera off, not yet sharing — nothing is capturing, so nothing fires until the share itself has run for about 10 seconds. The calendar watcher or ⌘⇧P covers that case. On the Mac App Store build the camera is read from the macOS recording indicator, which needs no permission — but macOS lights it for screen recording too, so a screen recording can also arm Privacy Mode there.

Ignored Apps

Add the apps that hold your mic or camera all day — a dictation tool, a streaming app — and they will never turn Privacy Mode on. One honest caveat, which the settings card also shows in red: while an ignored app is holding the microphone, screen-share detection is paused too, because macOS does not say which app is using the camera or capturing the screen. Manual arming, the hotkey and the calendar are unaffected.

Pause auto-arm

Recording a screencast on purpose? Pause auto-arm for 15 or 30 minutes, 1, 2 or 4 hours, or until you turn it back on. Detection keeps watching but stops arming, ⌘⇧P still works, and every timed option expires by itself with a countdown in the popover.

06Calendar auto-arm

A safety net for the muted-and-listening case — off until you switch it on.

How it works

Reads your macOS calendars locally and read-only, and finds the next event with a Zoom, Teams, Google Meet or Webex link. It arms your chosen lead time before the start — 1, 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes, 15 by default — with a countdown in the popover and menu bar. Not now dismisses only that early arm: it arms again at the meeting's real start time and holds through the scheduled end. There is deliberately no way to skip a meeting's protection outright. It re-checks every 20 seconds and the instant macOS reports a calendar change, so a last-minute invite is normally picked up within seconds.

Worth knowing: It sees only what macOS Calendar sees — a Google or Exchange calendar works once that account is added in System Settings ▸ Internet Accounts. It matches those four services exactly, so Slack huddles, Discord, Whereby and phone bridges never arm it, and all-day events are ignored.

07History

What armed, when, and for how long.

The last 100 sessions

Control Panel ▸ History lists when each Privacy Mode session started, how long it lasted and what caused it — Manual, Calendar or Detected, with a label such as "Zoom" or "Screen being shared". A session cut short by a quit or crash shows as Interrupted rather than a wrong duration. It never records what was on your screen, it never leaves your Mac, and you can clear it.

08Now go try it.

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