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What's the word to describe the act of darkening windows to disallow visibility from outside yet visibility from inside to outside is possible?

I was thinking of tinting, to tint a window, but visibility is still possible from a tinted window. In this case, the windows are darkened and visibility is completely impossible; all that you see from outside is a reflection of yourself, like in a mirror. You see these kinds of windows in places like hotels and offices. What's the word to describe the making of these windows and what are these windows called?

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There is some overlap here with english.stackexchange.com/questions/66543/…. – Sven Yargs Mar 3 at 19:40

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The Wikipedia article on "Window film" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_film) suggests that the term "tinting" may apply to window darkeners that possess various degrees of translucence:

Privacy films reduce visibility through the glass. Privacy film for flat-glass commercial and residential applications may be silvered, offering an unimpeded view from the low-light side but virtually no view from the high-light side. It may also be frosted, rendering the window translucent but not transparent. Privacy films for automobiles are available in gradients of darkness, with the darker tints commonly known as "limo tint."

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"A one-way mirror, also known as a two-way mirror, one-way glass, or two-way glass is a mirror that is partially reflective and partially transparent. When one side of the mirror is brightly lit and the other is dark, it allows viewing from the darkened side but not vice versa" Wikipedia. (Personally, I would have thought two-way glass was just called glass, but as long as your audience understands you...)

There is, however, no single word, nor do I see any reason for one. Why do so many people think every concept can or should be expressed in just one word?

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Supposing your terms are right, how do you call the act of darkening ... blah, blah, blah, which is the word the OP are looking for. Don't you know that the act is named polarizing? – Carlo_R. Mar 3 at 20:45
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@Carlo_R.- Polarizing does not disallow visibility, it simply filters out light waves who's plane of oscillation is not aligned with the polarizing filter. Stray reflections off objects lit by sunlight often have their plane of oscillation rotated like this and so many sunglasses manufacturers add polarization to their lenses. This, they claim, sharpens the image rather than dimming, darkening, or obscuring. – Jim Mar 3 at 22:49
See polarization.com/water/water.html for an explanation of polarization and why it blocks reflections. Note that the polarized glass in the picture is almost perfectly clear and blocks very little of the randomly-polarized light in the picture on the left. – Wayne Johnston Mar 4 at 2:06
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enter image description here

The best I can think of is "polarizing".

Window glasses can be "polarized" for having the effect you have described.

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Polarization is a different effect and it works in both directions. The OP was looking for a one-way effect. The picture you show is not polarized glass, but glass that has been coated - or perhaps treated in some other way - to block part of the light. In the day it will be hard to see in from outside, but the opposite is true at night where it will be hard to see out from the bright interior. (Polarized glass is clear. Polarized sunglasses are both tinted and polarized. The polarizing isn't the part that makes them dark.) – Wayne Johnston Mar 4 at 1:59

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