Obfuscate is a Free Extension for Mozilla Firefox that obscures the text on any webpage and makes it unreadable so that you may take a screenshot of the page without revealing any personal data. The structure and layout of the webpage remains intact while using the extension.
Often, we come across situations when we may be required to take a screenshot of a webpage that also contains some personal text information that cannot be shared. In such cases, the normal practice is to use an image editor and remove or hide that part of the page that contains the text data before sharing the screenshot. This is often time consuming and cumbersome especially if there is plenty of text data that needs to be concealed. Obfuscate does this, right from your browser so that you do not require any other tools to hide the sensitive text.
You just need to select the text and run the extension and Obfuscate will obscure all the text that you have selected on the webpage. Alternatively, you can also use the keyboard shortcuts to do the job. You can then go ahead, take a screenshot of the page, and share it without bothering about using an image editor.
How it Works:
1. Download and install the Firefox Extension from the link provided at the end of this article.
2. Navigate to the webpage whose screenshot you wish to take and select the text to be concealed.
3. Run the Obfuscate extension or press Alt + Shift + O and the selected text will be masked immediately. If you do not select any text before running the extension, all the text in the webpage will get obscured.
4. Take a screenshot of the webpage using any application and share it with others without revealing any personal data. You can verify that the layout of the webpage has not changed so as to maintain the originality. I have produced some screenshots below in which I have obscured selected text from Twitter, LinkedIn and WhatsApp.
Final Comments:
Overall, Obfuscate is a good Firefox Plugin to hide sensitive text in a webpage before taking a screenshot. It would have been more useful had there also been any such feature to obscure web images and photos for data privacy.
Click here to download Obfuscate Plugin for Firefox.
