Automatically masking sensitive information during screen sharing

A computer program product for automatically masking sensitive information during screen sharing, the computer program product comprising:

• one or more computer readable storage media and program instructions stored on the one or more computer readable storage media, the program instructions comprising:
• program instructions to establish a shared memory area within a computing device for a webpage browser and a screen capturing agent, the shared memory area storing a shared variable to be turned on and off according to a screen capturing activity status;
• program instructions to detect a start screensharing event corresponding to the screen capturing activity status, the start screensharing event indicating a start of a screen sharing session in the webpage browser;
• program instructions to, responsive to detecting the start screensharing event, turn on, by the screen capturing agent, the shared variable indicative of the detected screen capturing activity status;
• program instructions to perform a polling operation on the shared variable to check the screen capturing activity status;
• program instructions to, responsive to the shared variable being turned on, identify sensitive data images within a webpage to be shared in the screen sharing session, the sensitive data images being surrounded with hypertext markup language (HTML) tags indicating data images to be masked;
• program instructions to mask the sensitive data images in the webpage browser during the screen sharing session by updating a document object model of the webpage;
• and
• program instructions to wait for an acknowledgment message, communicated over an inter-process communication channel, from the webpage browser that the sensitive data images have been masked before displaying the screen sharing session.

A computer system for automatically masking sensitive information during screen sharing, the computer system comprising:

• one or more computer processors;
• one or more computer readable storage media;
• program instructions stored on the one or more computer readable storage media for execution by at least one of the one or more processors, the program instructions comprising:
• program instructions to establish a shared memory area within a computing device for a webpage browser and a screen capturing agent, the shared memory area storing a shared variable to be turned on and off according to a screen capturing activity status;
• program instructions to detect a start screensharing event corresponding to the screen capturing activity status, the start screensharing event indicating a start of a screen sharing session in the webpage browser;
• program instructions to, responsive to detecting the start screensharing event, turn on, by the screen capturing agent, the shared variable indicative of the detected screen capturing activity status;
• program instructions to perform a polling operation on the shared variable to check the screen capturing activity status;
• program instructions to, responsive to the shared variable being turned on, identify sensitive data images within a webpage to be shared in the screen sharing session, the sensitive data images being surrounded with hypertext markup language (HTML) tags indicating data images to be masked;
• program instructions to mask the sensitive data images in the webpage browser during the screen sharing session by updating a document object model of the webpage;
• and
• program instructions to wait for an acknowledgment message, communicated over an inter-process communication channel, from the webpage browser that the sensitive data images have been masked before displaying the screen sharing session.