I nearly shipped a product demo recording that had a customer’s email address sitting in the UI.
Not because I’m reckless. Because I was rushing, I had 10 tabs open, and “I’ll blur it later” felt easier than doing it right.
Here’s the simple Chrome workflow I use now when I’m recording SaaS demos (Loom, Meet, OBS, whatever). It’s designed to prevent the common leaks: names, emails, IDs, internal URLs, and random notifications.
Step 1: Make the demo screen boring
- Use a dedicated Chrome profile for demos.
- Keep the bookmarks bar clean.
- Keep only the extensions you need.
- Pin only the tabs you will actually show.
If you share your full desktop, you’re one notification away from an awkward moment. I prefer sharing a single window when possible.
Step 2: Kill notifications everywhere
- OS Focus / Do Not Disturb.
- Slack/Teams/Discord DND.
- Browser extension popups.
This is the fastest “risk reduction per minute” step.
Step 3: Blur sensitive regions before you hit record
Some sensitive info can’t be removed without breaking the flow (think: account dropdowns, invoices, user tables, admin pages).
So I blur it before recording. Not in post.
Step 4: Do a 5-second dry run
Record 5 seconds, click through the first two screens, stop, rewatch.
This catches the stuff you don’t notice while presenting: tab titles, autocomplete suggestions, recent files dialogs, and tiny popups.
A small tool that helped me
I built a Chrome extension called BlurMate to make the “blur first” step less error-prone. It lets you place blur overlays on top of the page (no upload required).
Product site: https://blurmate.devstorex.top
Top comments (1)
Ok, this is great. I know many people who would find your extension helpful, sharing this with them as we speak. Needless to say, I don't know how many times I realized halfway through recording that something that shouldn't be visible was right there in the open and had to start over. We use Supademo now at work, and you can mask or swap out sensitive data directly in the demo environment before anyone even sees it, but before... Anyway, if you don't use a specialized platform with this feature, this extension is a blessing. Thanks for sharing.