As a tech writer I must have taken a thousand screenshots of my phone or my monitor for publishing on the web, and each time I do it I have to check carefully to make sure I’m not sharing more than I should. But in an upcoming version of Chrome for Android, your browser will do that for you.
Bleeping Computer spotted the new Chrome experimental flag, which says it can detect the presence of “sensitive form fields” including passwords and credit card numbers. If such fields are present on the page, Chrome will block them out for any screenshots or when sharing your screen to another display, locally or over the network.
Chrome for Android already disables the screenshot function if you’re currently looking at a page in Incognito Mode (one of the privacy-protecting features Chrome isn’t fibbing about). But the practical realities of Incognito browsing mean that most people won’t be using it for stores or services requiring a login. This extra security step makes a lot of sense for regular web surfing.
Precisely when the new feature will start testing with regular users isn’t clear, but it should be showing up in a build of Chrome Canary for Android before too long. If there are no major issues, eventually it should graduate to Chrome Beta and the full release. Whether or not it will show up in the desktop, ChromeOS or iOS versions of Chrome is anybody’s guess.