Can BBB hosts detect screen recording?
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Günter
Dec 10, 2025, 6:11:59 AM12/10/25
to bigbluebutton-users
Hello everyone,
I have a technical question regarding BigBlueButton's monitoring capabilities.
In a recent lecture, an IT professor repeatedly removed a student from the session, claiming he could see "digital footprints" indicating that the student was recording the screen.
From a purely technical perspective (browser sandboxing), external recording programs (like OBS or Wondershare) should actually be invisible to the web application.
My question: Does BBB truly have a feature that displays such local recordings to the host/moderator?
Thank you for your insights!
Sheldon Cardoza
Dec 15, 2025, 11:54:57 AM12/15/25
to bigbluebutton-users
Hi
Günter,
From a purely technical standpoint, BigBlueButton (and the browser in general) cannot reliably detect whether a participant is using an external, local screen-recording application such as OBS, QuickTime, or Wondershare. Those tools operate at the operating system level, and due to browser sandboxing and privacy constraints, a web application does not have visibility into the processes running on a user’s device.
What BigBlueButton can do is log and expose activity that happens inside the session, for example:
- Who joined/left, and when
- Audio/video usage and device changes (within the browser)
- Chat messages, shared notes, polls, reactions
- Screen sharing events (if the participant is sharing)
- Network/quality indicators and certain client-side events relevant to troubleshooting
However, that is different from detecting a user running a local recording program. There is no standard BigBlueButton feature that tells a moderator, “this participant is recording their screen with an external program.”
If the instructor believed a recording was happening, it may have been based on indirect signals (for example, unusual behavior, repeated reconnections, or screen-sharing indicators) or a misunderstanding of what the platform can actually observe.
If anyone has a specific BBB version/build or a plugin in mind (or knows of a third-party integration that claims this capability), it would be helpful to share, because the only plausible path for “recording detection” would be via a custom client modification, specialized browser extension, or endpoint security tooling; none of which is standard BBB functionality.
I hope this helps clear up the technical limits.
Günter,
From a purely technical standpoint, BigBlueButton (and the browser in general) cannot reliably detect whether a participant is using an external, local screen-recording application such as OBS, QuickTime, or Wondershare. Those tools operate at the operating system level, and due to browser sandboxing and privacy constraints, a web application does not have visibility into the processes running on a user’s device.
What BigBlueButton can do is log and expose activity that happens inside the session, for example:
- Who joined/left, and when
- Audio/video usage and device changes (within the browser)
- Chat messages, shared notes, polls, reactions
- Screen sharing events (if the participant is sharing)
- Network/quality indicators and certain client-side events relevant to troubleshooting
However, that is different from detecting a user running a local recording program. There is no standard BigBlueButton feature that tells a moderator, “this participant is recording their screen with an external program.”
If the instructor believed a recording was happening, it may have been based on indirect signals (for example, unusual behavior, repeated reconnections, or screen-sharing indicators) or a misunderstanding of what the platform can actually observe.
If anyone has a specific BBB version/build or a plugin in mind (or knows of a third-party integration that claims this capability), it would be helpful to share, because the only plausible path for “recording detection” would be via a custom client modification, specialized browser extension, or endpoint security tooling; none of which is standard BBB functionality.
I hope this helps clear up the technical limits.
Cheers
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