Protect your private information before it appears on stream.
You alt-tab to your inbox for two seconds. Your email address, your real name and a password-reset link are now in the recording, and someone will scrub back to that frame. Capture Shield hides that information on the page itself — before the browser draws it.
Free · No account · No sign-up · Nothing leaves your browser
- y•••••@•••••.com
- Phone
- +•• ••• ••• 456
- Card on file
- •••• •••• •••• 1111
- Account holder
- A••• M•••••
- Order reference
- #1234567890
- Shipping
- Arrives Tuesday
What it hides
Each category is a switch. Turn off the ones you do not care about, and nothing in that category is ever touched.
Email addresses
Full addresses anywhere on the page, including addresses split across separate elements — which is how most webmail renders them.
Phone numbers
International and national formats. Order numbers, dates, version strings and SKUs are scored and rejected rather than masked.
Payment cards
Validated with a Luhn checksum and issuer prefix, so a 16-digit reference number stays readable while a real card does not.
IP addresses
Public IPv4 and IPv6. Private ranges such as 192.168.x.x are left alone — they identify nobody and masking them only creates noise.
Your own details
Add your real name, handle, address or anything else. Names are never guessed from page text — only what you have entered is treated as a name.
Revealing URLs
Addresses carrying tokens, session ids, email parameters or a profile slug with your name in it.
Hover destinations
Chrome previews every link target at the bottom-left of the window. Capture Shield masks the destination on qualifying links so there is nothing revealing to preview, and restores it the instant you click.
Balances, with an eye
Amounts next to account wording — balance, available, payout, salary — are hidden; shop prices are not. Hover a hidden figure and an eye appears so you can check it yourself without showing the room.
Wallets and recovery phrases
Almost every wallet address carries its own checksum, so an address is recognised rather than guessed at — Bitcoin, Ethereum, and any chain that uses the same formats. Recovery phrases and private keys are covered too. This is the one leak that cannot be undone once a clip is on the internet.
Hide anything
Select any text, right-click, "Hide this". It becomes a protected value everywhere, which is how you cover the things no detector could guess — an employer, a project name, a reference number.
Capture Mode
The pre-stream switch. Every category on, detection turned up, hover destinations hidden — one click instead of fifteen settings.
Panic Mode
Ctrl+Shift+P for maximum protection immediately. Press it again and your previous settings come back exactly as they were.
Site exceptions
Turn protection off for sites where you never share your screen, or where you need to read the real values while recording something else.
Four masking styles
Blur, blackout, dots or partial — partial keeps the last few characters so you can still tell two accounts apart on camera.
Form fields
Input boxes are shielded visually and never rewritten. What you type is what the site receives, and autofill, validation and submission are untouched.
How it works
There is no server in this picture. The extension is a piece of code that runs inside your browser tab, and that is the whole architecture.
The page is held back
The extension starts before the page is drawn and keeps it hidden for the moment it takes to do the first pass. The earliest frame that can be recorded is already masked.
Text is read in place
Visible text is collected and checked against the detectors and against your own protected values. This happens in the tab, in memory, and the result is discarded immediately.
Values are replaced, not covered
A blur filter still has the real text underneath it — a screenshot or a disabled filter gives it straight back. Capture Shield changes the rendered characters instead, so there is nothing left to recover.
New content is caught first
A new message, a live chat line, a dashboard refresh — each one is masked in the same frame it appears in, rather than a frame later.
Why replacing beats blurring
Most "privacy" extensions paint a CSS blur over sensitive text. That is a visual effect, not a protection: the original characters are still in the page, still in the accessibility tree, still in a screenshot taken by the recording software, and still there for anyone who opens developer tools. Capture Shield rewrites what the page renders, so what is captured is the mask.
Why it does not break sites
Nothing is wrapped in new elements and no nodes are moved, so React, Vue and Angular never find their tree rearranged underneath them. Links keep working, buttons keep working, scrolling keeps working, and the value your form fields submit is the value you typed.
Privacy
This extension exists to keep your personal information off a recording. It would be absurd for it to collect that information itself, so it does not — and it is built so that it could not.
- ✓ No servers. There is no backend. The extension contains no networking code at all — no requests to send anything anywhere.
- ✓ No accounts. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to log into, nothing to identify you by.
- ✓ No analytics or telemetry. Not anonymised, not aggregated. None at all.
- ✓ Page content is never stored. Text is examined in memory and discarded. Nothing is written to disk.
- ✓ Your settings stay on your device. Chrome's sync storage would copy your real name and address through Google's servers, so local storage is used instead.
- ✓ No browsing history is collected. The extension does not keep a record of the pages you visit.
The one broad permission
Chrome will tell you this extension can read data on all websites, and that is accurate — it has to read the page to find what needs hiding, and the page that needs hiding is whichever one you happen to open while recording. What it does with that access is read text and change what is displayed. There is no code path that sends it anywhere, because there is no networking code.
Read the full privacy policyWhat it cannot do
A tool like this is worth having only if you know exactly where it stops. It is a safety net that reduces exposure. It is not a guarantee, and anyone selling you one is lying.
- Chrome's own interface. The address bar, bookmarks, history, downloads bar, profile menu and the link preview bubble itself are browser UI. Extensions cannot draw over them or modify them.
- Other applications. Discord, OBS, your mail client, desktop notifications, your file explorer — all outside the browser and outside reach.
- Video, canvas and WebGL. Text painted into a canvas or baked into a video is pixels, not characters. There is nothing to detect.
- Images, screenshots and PDFs. Same reason. Reading text out of pixels needs OCR, which this extension does not do.
-
Pages Chrome closes to extensions.
chrome://pages, the Web Store and a few others cannot be touched by any extension. - Anything it does not recognise. An unusual identifier, an employer name, a project codename — if it has no distinctive shape and you have not added it, it will not be caught.
Use it as one layer alongside a clean streaming profile, a scene that crops rather than captures your whole desktop, and a broadcast delay.
It is free and provided as is, with no warranty and no guarantee of protection. What appears in your broadcast stays your responsibility — the terms of use say so plainly, and say what the developer is and is not liable for.
Questions
Does it send my data to a server?
No. There is no server, and the extension contains no networking code — no
fetch, no XMLHttpRequest, no WebSockets, no beacons. Detection
runs inside the tab. You can verify this: the source is bundled with the extension and
you can read it in Chrome's developer tools.
Does it work on Gmail?
Yes. Gmail is a dynamic application that inserts content constantly, which is the case the extension is designed around — new messages are masked as they arrive rather than a frame later. Addresses split across several elements, which Gmail does routinely, are handled too.
Does it work on Discord web?
Yes, on discord.com in the browser. The Discord desktop app is a separate
application and cannot be reached by a Chrome extension — if you stream the desktop
app, use Discord's own streamer mode as well.
Does it protect desktop applications?
No. It only affects pages rendered inside Chrome. Anything else on your desktop is untouched.
Does it protect OBS?
Not directly, and it does not need to. OBS captures what your screen shows; if the browser is showing a masked page, that is what OBS records. What it cannot help with is OBS's own windows — your scene list, your stream key dialog, your alert URLs.
Can it guarantee that nothing leaks?
No, and it does not claim to. It reduces exposure on rendered web page text. It cannot see canvas, video, images, browser UI or other applications, and it cannot recognise a value it has never been taught and cannot infer from shape. Treat it as one layer of a setup, not the whole thing.
Does it slow down Chrome?
Work is time-boxed and bounded. Each pass gets a small budget of milliseconds, results are cached per element so nothing is scanned twice, and off-screen content is handled when the browser is idle. On page load there is a brief moment where the page is held hidden while the first pass runs — that is deliberate, and it is what stops the first frame from leaking. It can be turned off in Settings → Performance.
Will it break the sites I use?
It is built specifically not to. No elements are wrapped or moved, so framework-managed pages are not disturbed; links, buttons and scrolling keep working; and form fields are shielded visually without ever changing their value, so what you type is what gets submitted. If you do hit a site that misbehaves, add it as an exception in Settings and tell us about it.
Is it free?
Yes, completely, with no paid tier and no feature held back. There is no account, no subscription and nothing to buy. The popup carries an optional tip button — it is voluntary, it unlocks nothing, and every feature works identically whether you use it or not.
Install
Then open the settings page and add your name, so it can hide the one thing it cannot guess.
Support
If a site is not being protected properly, or something on a page broke, that is worth knowing about — those reports are what the detection rules get built from.
Something is not being hidden
Tell us the site and the kind of value. Please do not send the real value itself — describe its shape instead, or replace the digits.
A site stopped working
Add it under Settings → Website exceptions to unblock yourself immediately, then let us know which site and what broke.
What it costs
Capture Shield is free, has no account, no subscription and no paid tier. There is nothing to buy and nothing to cancel.
It also has no analytics, so there is no usage report telling anybody what you browsed — see the privacy policy for exactly what is and is not stored.
If it saved you from a bad moment on stream, there is a tip jar. It is voluntary, it unlocks nothing, and the extension has no way of knowing whether you used it.