Can People See Your AI Notetaker When You Share Your Screen?

The short answer

If your notetaker joins as a bot, everyone can already see it in the participant list, and sharing your screen changes nothing. If it runs on your Mac with no bot, the other side sees whatever of it is on the part of the screen you share. That usually means the notes window, which holds a live transcript of the call they are on, and often a sidebar listing the titles of your other meetings.

Some apps promise that their window is hidden from screen shares. On a current Mac, treat that promise as unreliable. Whether it holds depends on how the meeting app captures your screen, and you do not control that.

What a share actually shows

Zoom, Google Meet and Teams all let you share either your entire screen or a single window. That choice decides almost everything.

Share the entire screen and the other side gets every window that is on it: the notes app, a floating recording indicator if the tool has one, the menu bar, and any notification that slides in. Share one window, such as the slide deck or the browser tab you are presenting, and they get that window and nothing else, even if the notes app is open on top of it on your side.

The part people underestimate is the sidebar. A notes app open on today's meeting usually lists recent meetings down the left. Titles like a renewal call with the customer's name, a candidate debrief, or a board prep session are exactly what you would not want on a shared screen, and they are visible for as long as the window is.

Why a hidden window is a weak promise on a Mac

Mac apps hide a window from capture by setting a flag on it that tells other processes they may not read its contents. Apple's own documentation for that value now calls it a legacy constant that macOS no longer uses, and tells developers not to use it to hide content from capture.

Electron, the framework many desktop notetakers are built on, says the same thing in its documentation for the call that sets this flag: because of an intentional change in macOS, newer apps that capture with ScreenCaptureKit will capture your window anyway. An Electron maintainer explained the split in the project's issue tracker in September 2025. Apps that capture through the older CoreGraphics interfaces respect the flag. Apps that capture through ScreenCaptureKit, the framework Apple now provides for screen sharing, do not.

The issue that prompted that answer shows how fragile this is in practice. A developer found their protected window visible in another company's meeting app, then invisible in the same app once they lowered the share quality to 720p at 15 frames a second. Same window, same flag, different result, most likely because the meeting app captured through a different path at that setting.

So when a tool tells you its window cannot be seen in a screen share, the honest reading is that it cannot be seen by some capture methods. Before you show anything sensitive, assume it will show up.

The other direction: your notetaker capturing their screen

There is a second question buyers miss: whether your notetaker records what other people present to you. Granola has a feature that does this. Its documentation describes snapshots of a screen someone else shares, attached to your note and uploaded to Granola, on macOS 14 or newer, in the Zoom desktop app, Google Meet in Chrome, and Teams. It does not snapshot a screen you share yourself.

Two details in that documentation matter if you are the one presenting to a Granola user. If you share your entire desktop, everything you show is included. And the tool reminds its own user to get your consent, which tells you the consent step sits with the person taking notes. On Granola's enterprise plans the feature stays off until a workspace admin turns it on, so a company can decide this centrally.

What Driffle hides, and what it does not

Driffle shows a small floating recording pill while it captures a meeting. In the shipped desktop app that pill is set to be excluded from screen capture every time it is created, with no opt in, on the reasoning that a status indicator should not be broadcast to people who were never told about it. It uses the same flag described above, so against a meeting app that captures through ScreenCaptureKit, expect the pill to appear in a full screen share.

The main Driffle window, with your notes, the live transcript and the meeting list, is visible in a screen share like any other window. That is the default in the code, and the current release has no setting to hide it. If you do not want the other side to see it, share a single window, or move Driffle off the screen you are sharing.

Driffle also does not take pictures of what other people present. It does not hold the macOS Screen Recording permission. It transcribes from the microphone and system audio, and with the optional Accessibility permission it reads names from the meeting window so transcript lines carry a person's name. Driffle runs on Macs with Apple Silicon, and transcription and the AI run in the cloud.

A five minute test before a call that matters

Run this once with a colleague, or with a second device signed into the same meeting, and look at what the other side receives.

• Start a recording, open the notes window, and share your entire screen. Can the other side read the transcript and the meeting list?
• Leave the floating indicator showing and check whether it appears on their side.
• Repeat with the meeting app in the browser instead of the desktop app. Capture paths differ, and so can the result.
• Now share only the window you meant to present, with the notes app open on top of it on your side. Confirm it disappears for them.
• Ask someone to present to you, then check whether your notetaker saved any images of their screen and where those went.

The habit that actually protects you

Share a window, not your screen. It is the one control that holds across every notetaker, every meeting app and every capture method, and it costs nothing. Everything else, including any app's promise to stay hidden, is a backup.

If you want a Mac notetaker with no bot in the call, Driffle is at driffle.ai/download.