Test version Chrome for Android can redact sensitive information on screen

Google has released a test version of its web browser Chrome for Android with a feature that can hide sensitive and personal information when a user shares or records his screen.

Incognito mode doesn’t let users share or record pages that are displayed on the screen. In regular tabs though, you can do however you please. But if you do decide to share your screen, you can incidentally share all kinds of sensitive and personal information, including usernames, passwords, or financial information.

To prevent this from happening Google came up with a new feature called ‘Redact sensitive content during screen sharing, screen recording, and similar actions’.

“When enabled, if sensitive form fields (such as credit cards, passwords) are present on the page, the entire content area is redacted during screen sharing, screen recording, and similar actions. This feature works only on Android V or above,” the flag description says.

Unfortunately, the flag currently doesn’t work. However, it’s a nifty new feature for content creators who use screen capture software: it’ll save them a lot of time in the video editing process.

It’s unclear if and when the redact feature will be rolled out to everyone. In a few weeks however it’ll be available in Chrome Canary, an experimental and unstable version of Chrome for experienced developers that’s updated nightly.

The new feature was discovered by X user Leopeva64, who made a screenshot of its description. He also found out that the tab switcher context menu has new options to ‘switch to incognito’ and ‘switch out of incognito’.

Another feature he found was the option to close all incognito tabs at once.