How to Blur Revenue and Customer Data in Looker During Screen Sharing
Hide ARR tiles, customer emails and Explore results in Looker while you screen-share. A per-site blur that survives filter changes, Zoom, Meet, Teams and Loom.
To hide revenue and customer data in Looker while you screen-share, use a browser extension such as BlurFirst that paints a real blur onto the page before you present. Save a per-site profile for your Looker instance so ARR tiles, customer emails inside data tables, and raw Explore results are covered the instant a dashboard renders. Because the blur is baked into the pixels you actually share, it survives Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Loom and any recording — it is not a Looker setting a viewer could talk you into toggling off.
What Looker puts on screen that you didn't mean to share
Looker is dense. A single dashboard can stack a dozen tiles, and each one is live SQL against your warehouse. When you drop into an Explore to answer a question mid-call, you are effectively projecting your production data model to everyone watching. The riskiest surfaces are rarely the chart you meant to show — they are the labels, tooltips and side panels around it.
- Explore query results — the row-level data table under a visualization, often listing individual customers, orders or user IDs before you aggregate them.
- Dashboard tiles with revenue, ARR, MRR and other KPIs — the single-value and trend tiles finance never wants leaving the room.
- Customer names and emails in data tables — dimension columns like
user.email,account.nameandcontact.phonerendered in full. - Filter values — the dropdowns and applied-filter chips that list your segments, account names and regions even before you run a query.
- The LookML model and connection names — shown in the Explore header and the Develop tab; they leak schema, table and warehouse detail.
- Scheduled-delivery recipient emails — the address list in a dashboard's Schedule / Send dialog.
And Looker re-renders constantly. Change a filter, drill into a tile, or cross-filter one visualization against another, and the whole dashboard repaints with fresh values — so anything you hid by scrolling away or resizing a window is instantly back on screen.
Why native Looker options don't solve the screen-share problem
You can build a filtered dashboard, apply user attributes, or hand out a Viewer role — but those are access controls for *other people's* logins, not for what leaves your screen when you present from a full-access account. Hiding a tile doesn't help when that tile is the one you need to walk through; the goal is to keep the layout intact while covering the exact values the audience shouldn't read. BlurFirst works at the pixel level inside your own browser, so you keep your normal admin view and simply blur what should stay private.
- 1
Install and open your dashboard
Add BlurFirst from the Chrome Web Store, then open the Looker dashboard or Explore you plan to share while it is still on your own screen.
- 2
Box-blur the revenue and KPI tiles
Press
Ctrl/⌘ ⇧ Yto start, then drag a rectangle over each ARR/MRR tile and any single-value KPI. The box stays anchored to that region as you scroll the dashboard. - 3
Element-blur the data tables and filters
Click a data-table cell, a customer-email column header, or the applied-filter chips to blur just that element; click again to reveal a value on purpose. Use the same gesture on the Explore results table.
- 4
Save a per-site profile so it auto-applies
Save the blur as a profile for your Looker host. It stores only the CSS selectors — never the data inside them — and re-applies on load, surviving Looker's single-page re-renders when you change filters or drill in.
- 5
Keep Panic ready
If a drill or a desktop notification surfaces something unexpected, press
Ctrl/⌘ ⇧ Hto blur the entire page instantly, then reveal piece by piece.
| Looker screen | Sensitive content | Best BlurFirst gesture |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboard | Revenue/ARR tiles, KPI single-values | Box blur per tile |
| Data-table tile | Customer names, emails, IDs | Element blur on the column |
| Explore | Row-level results, filter values | Box + element blur |
| Develop / model | LookML project + connection names | Element blur on the header |
| Schedule / Send | Recipient email addresses | Element blur on the list |
Everything happens in your browser. BlurFirst runs its content script in an isolated world with namespaced CSS, so it won't break Looker's own interactions, and nothing you blur is ever uploaded — the only network call the extension makes is a license check. It can't run on chrome:// pages or the Chrome Web Store itself, but a Looker tab is fine. If you want it to find emails and other patterns for you, run Scan to detect and blur emails, phone numbers, credit-card numbers, SSNs and API keys locally in one click.