PeekShield
Add to Chrome
PeekShield blurs messages, photos and names on seven chat apps. Hover to read. Move away and it blurs again.
Did you get the offer letter?
Yes! Signing tonight. Don’t tell anyone yet
My lips are sealed. Salary?
Tell you at lunch
A few everyday situations PeekShield was built for.
Co-working space
You’re on a hot desk with your client’s WhatsApp group open beside your work. Anyone glancing over sees a column of blurred names and messages. You hover the one line you need, read it, and move on.
Helps: Chat messagesNamesProfile pictures
Video call
You share your screen to walk the team through a document, and Slack and Messenger are one click away. If you flip to them by mistake, the room sees blur, not your DMs. You only reveal what you hover.
Helps: Blur strength: HighHover to reveal
Train, bus, café
The chat list gives away the most: who you talk to and the start of every message. PeekShield blurs previews, names and pictures, so a person behind your seat can’t piece anything together.
Helps: Message previewsNames
Home
Alone at your desk and don’t need it? Press Alt + X (⌥ Option + X on a Mac) and everything reads normally. Press it again before you head out. The OFF badge on the icon reminds you if you forget.
Helps: Alt + X
Most blur extensions cover one app, so you end up installing one for WhatsApp, another for Discord, another for Slack. PeekShield covers all of these with the same switches and the same shortcut.
Web versions only, not the desktop apps. Apps marked new are still being tuned. On Facebook, only chats are blurred; your feed is left alone.
What it looks like in a real chat window: blurred by default, readable where you hover.
Watch on YouTube if you prefer, with captions.
Click the PeekShield icon in your toolbar. Every switch applies instantly, and your choices follow you to every supported app.
An extension that can see your chats has to earn your trust, so PeekShield is built to have nothing to send. It adds a stylesheet that blurs parts of the page. It never reads what the page says.
storage for your settings, activeTab to see which app you’re onChrome will say PeekShield can “read and change data” on the seven chat sites. That’s the wording for any extension that changes how a page looks; it’s how the blur gets applied. The full details are in the privacy policy.
Install PeekShield, then open web.whatsapp.com. Messages, chat names, previews and profile pictures are blurred straight away, with nothing to set up. Hover over anything to read it, and press Alt + X to turn the blur off and on.
Turn PeekShield on before the call, and set Blur strength to High in the popup so shapes are hidden too. Your chats stay blurred for everyone watching, and you can hover a single message when you need to read it. Switching on Blur when I switch tabs also hides the page in tab previews and window switchers.
Yes. PeekShield works on the web versions of WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Messenger, Facebook chat and LinkedIn messaging, with the same switches everywhere. Support for Telegram, Messenger, Facebook and LinkedIn is newer and still being tuned.
No. It only changes how the page looks, the same way a stylesheet does. It doesn’t read, store or send what’s on the page, and there’s no server it could send anything to.
Chrome pauses tabs you haven’t used for a long time, and PeekShield can also lose its connection to a tab if the extension updated while that tab was open. The switch still says on, but the page isn’t blurred.
A hard reload fixes it: press Ctrl + Shift + R on Windows and Linux, or ⌘ + Shift + R on a Mac. That reloads the page and PeekShield starts blurring again straight away.
These apps update their pages often, and sometimes a change moves something out of PeekShield’s reach. Click the PeekShield icon, then Something not blurred? Report it at the bottom. It opens an email to me with the app name and versions already filled in.
It helps a lot to attach a short screen recording of where it happens, like opening group info or switching to a tab. If you can’t record, a screenshot works too. Before attaching, cover or crop anything private, since the part that wasn’t blurred may show real messages. A test chat is ideal.
No. PeekShield is a Chrome extension, so it works on the web versions: web.whatsapp.com, web.telegram.org, discord.com, app.slack.com, messenger.com, facebook.com and linkedin.com/messaging.
Hover over it. To turn everything off for a while, press Alt + X (⌥ Option + X on a Mac), and press it again to turn it back on. You can change the shortcut at chrome://extensions/shortcuts.
On purpose. PeekShield is for private conversations, so on Facebook it only blurs chats: the pop-up chat windows and the Messages page. Your feed is mostly public posts, and blurring it would make Facebook hard to use.
No. The blur is plain CSS, which the graphics card handles. Nothing scans the page or runs on a timer while you chat.
Yes, with no ads and no paid tier. If it’s useful to you, there’s a support link. It’s optional and changes nothing in the extension.
A short review on the Chrome Web Store helps other people find it, and tells me what to fix next.
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