Applications Screen Capture When Leaving Full Screen Mode on Sonoma -- Google Chrome is capturing your screen -- screen capture when minimizing window Mac MacBook laptop
Applications are capturing my screen when I leave Full Screen mode. I first noticed it a month or months ago with Google Chrome. The solution was to disallow Google Chrome from capturing my screen. This was a working solution but became frustrating after several Google Meets. The capture occurred right after pressing the green icon in the top left of the full screen application. Along the top bar of my Mac's screen, I noticed a purple (or blue) icon that had a person in front of what appeared to be a screen. When clicking on it, it showed the icon and read "Google Chrome is capturing your screen." This message lasted for about 4-5 seconds each time. I replicated it to find that this was triggered by leaving Full Screen mode.
Jump to today, I noticed that Discord was doing the same thing. The very same icon and message appeared when I left my Full Screen view of the application. The message was the same while replacing with the name of this application, Discord. See below.
I do not want to change the System Settings for each of my applications. [This task is especially tedious when new applications are downloaded.] I would like to preserve my privacy. The question that has entered my mind is whether
- Google Chrome and Discord (and possibly others) already had been capturing the screen, and this new feature from Apple was a transparency initiative; or
- the screen capture is done by this newest upgrade to Sonoma in order to gather data on my personal workflow.
I do not totally trust that the issue is not of the 2nd category. On my iPhone, for every new application I download, I have to manually turn off an application-specific toggle that opts out of Apple training on my usage of the application. Hence, I tend not to trust that this is another way for Apple to secretively gather information.
Either way, I would like for these issues not to come up. Has anyone encountered these issues before? I know there was an entire Reddit thread dedicated to this issue for Google Chrome. Like with the iPhone, is there a simple setting that can be turned off to stop this behavior - one that specifically does not as a result also disallow intentional captures like a Screen Share?
ALSO, the details below stating the size and OS are incorrect. I run Version 14.0 (23A344) which is Sonoma.
This capture highlights the warning that appears. It shows up with all of the other toolbar widgets. (Please forgive me for Nord! It's just so cheap!)
MacBook Pro 13″