You’re reviewing a client contract at a shared desk. On your screen, salary figures, legal terms, and a company name that you don’t want to be visible to the person sitting 18 inches to your left. You angle your laptop. You hunch forward a little. You know this isn’t a proper solution.

Or you’re on a call with HR about a personnel issue, and you suddenly realize the phone booth was booked. You decide to take the call at your desk, and your voice carries more than you thought. The person across the table is wearing headphones, but are they noise-canceling? Are they even playing anything?

These aren’t hypothetical challenges. They’re real-world problems. And if you handle confidential work in any kind of shared environment, the question isn’t whether your information is exposed. It’s whether you’ve done anything deliberate to prevent it.

Three ways information leaks

Confidential data doesn’t leave your control through one channel. It leaves through three: what people can see on your screen, what people can hear from your calls, and what gets intercepted on the network you’re connected to. Each one requires a different fix.

Most guides lump these together. But data security in a shared workspace gets much simpler when you address each threat on its own terms.

What’s on your screen

Visual hacking is exactly what it sounds like: someone reads sensitive information off your screen, your documents, or your device. It’s low-tech, high-impact, and far more common than most people assume. A 2025 survey by Kensington and Vanson Bourne of 1,000 senior IT decision-makers found that 23% identify visual hacking as a security concern.

The single most effective fix is a privacy screen filter for your laptop. These filters limit the viewing angle to roughly 30 degrees on either side, which means anyone not sitting directly behind your screen sees a darkened, unreadable display. They are affordable, attach in seconds, and don’t require any IT department approval. If you handle sensitive data outside a private office, this is the lowest-effort, highest-return investment you can make.

Beyond the filter, build one reflex: lock your screen every time you stand up. Even if you’re just walking to the kitchen for 30 seconds.

A privacy filter and a screen-lock habit together reduce the most common form of information exposure in shared workspaces.

What people can hear

Headphones solve the incoming noise problem, but they don’t solve the outgoing one. Your voice still carries, and in an open environment, a phone conversation about a client’s financials or an employee’s performance review is audible to anyone within a few desks.

How to take confidential calls in an open office comes down to one rule: use an enclosed space. A soundproof phone booth in a coworking space is built for exactly this. So is a bookable meeting room. If the space you work in doesn’t have either, that’s worth factoring into your decision the next time you evaluate where to work.

If the conversation is sensitive, the space needs a door. There’s no workaround for that.

What gets intercepted on the network

This is the threat most people know about in theory but ignore in practice. Shared Wi-Fi feels safe once you’ve entered the password, but being on the same network as strangers still carries risk. If you’re accessing anything over an unencrypted connection, that data can be exposed. And an attacker on the same network can intercept more than you’d expect. That includes the sites you visit, data you transmit, and login credentials for services that aren’t using HTTPS.

The fix is straightforward: use a VPN. A virtual private network encrypts your connection between your device and the VPN server, which means anyone else on the Wi-Fi network sees encrypted noise instead of your traffic.

Set your VPN to connect automatically whenever you join a new Wi-Fi network. The goal is to remove the decision entirely, because the time you forget is the time it matters most.

Your shared-space security kit

If you want a single, actionable checklist, here’s what to have in place before your next session at a coworking space, open office, or public workspace:

• Privacy screen filter on your laptop. 
• VPN, set to auto-connect on new networks.
• Screen-lock shortcut committed to muscle memory (Cmd+Ctrl+Q or Win+L).
• A booking habit: whenever a call involves confidential information, reserve a phone booth or meeting room before you start your day.

Four items, four tools. You can set all of this up in a single afternoon.

Choosing a space that takes privacy seriously

Is coworking safe for confidential work? It can be, but the space itself matters. When you’re evaluating a coworking environment, look for a few specific features: soundproof phone booths, bookable meeting rooms with solid doors (not glass partitions with no curtains), a reliable enterprise-grade Wi-Fi network, and a layout that offers seating options where your back can face a wall.

WeWork locations, for instance, typically include phone booths for private calls, bookable conference rooms, and private offices for teams that need them. In short, the infrastructure for handling sensitive work is already there.

The broader principle is simple: if privacy is part of your job, it should be part of how you choose where to work.