When you’re sharing your phone screen during a meeting or live stream, the last thing you want is for others to see private message. Or worse, you accidentally expose sensitive content like your password or company information. Android 15 is preparing a new feature with which you won’t have to worry about accidentally leaking sensitive content when sharing your screen.
As of Android 5.0, the operating system allows third-party applications to capture display content via the MediaProjection API. This is the same API used by the Quick Settings tile for screen recording. However, before apps start recording your phone’s screen, the operating system will ask the user if they want to allow this action and warn them about what it entails. Once permission is granted, the operating system displays a recording indicator in the status bar to let the user know that their screen is being recorded.
Although the system alerts the user, to be careful about which apps to share your screen with, currently can’t do anything to help users who have been tricked into sharing their screen with a malicious app. And it also can’t do much to prevent users from accidentally leaking sensitive content during an online meeting or live stream. Developers of highly sensitive applications (such as banking applications) can and often do block screenshots or screen recordings entirely, but not every application with sensitive content (such as news or email clients) chooses to go this route.
What Android 14 changed
Instead of giving developers a choice between blocking or not blocking screenshots and screen recordings, Google is working on ways to notify them when these actions occur. For example, in Android 14, Google added an API that notifies apps when a user takes a screenshot. Then in Android 15 DP2, Google added a similar API to detect screen recordings. Both of these APIs allow developers to decide what to do when a screenshot has been taken or a screen recording is in progress.
Android 15 will make you happy in bed. Especially with your eyes
Libor Foltynek
Upload one application
At the same time, Google introduced an app screen sharing feature in Android 14 QPR2 that allows users to record or share window of only one application instead of the whole screen. This ensures that things like notifications are not inadvertently recorded or shared. However, there is still a chance that users may accidentally over-share information from the app they are uploading. Additionally, there are times when users will need to switch the app they are recording or sharing, which means it would be better to record the entire screen.
What Android 15 changes
For these situations, Android 15 is preparing to introduce protection against sharing sensitive content during screen sharing. These screen sharing protections aren’t currently enabled even in the latest beta, so it’s not entirely certain what they’ll do, but there are some hints. A toggle was found in Developer Options with the name Disable screen sharing protectionwhich, as its name suggests, deactivates Android screen sharing protection 15. Flip this switch to disable system-applied app and notification protection during screen sharing.
Disable protection
The visibility of this switch is controlled by a setting related to a feature known internally as protection of sensitive content. Protecting sensitive content is disabled in the latest Android 15 beta, but there will likely be a new API that apps can use. It’s not entirely clear what apps can actually do with the API to protect sensitive content, but it appears to allow them to block specific fields from ending up in screen recordings or screen sharing. That way, apps wouldn’t have to completely block recordings or screen sharing.
Have you ever accidentally shared something you didn’t mean to?
Source: Android Police
