Until now, there were few ways to stop shoulder surfers from reading your computer screen: place a polarizing screen over your computer screen (not very practical for laptops), or mount a mirror on the side of your screen so you could see someone sneaking a peek from behind.This way sends peepers to the eye doctor...
Oculis Labs has a product called PrivateEye, a simple, low-cost (from $19.95), easy-to-deploy software application for enterprise and consumer use. It requires no special hardware, just a standard embedded webcam.
PrivateEye significantly improves on older technologies such as 3M privacy filters, and screen savers by performing active user-centric protection of all content displayed on the screen.
PrivateEye uses a webcam sensor to continuously assess the user’s area of interest, and uses this information to control what is displayed.
In the simplest mode, when PrivateEye determines that the user is looking at the display, the contents are presented normally. When the user looks away, the display is quickly blurred to protect the contents and when the user looks back, display is instantly cleared again. The effect is that contents are displayed only as needed by the authorized user. This feature alone significantly reduces the opportunities for eavesdroppers.
In addition to protecting the display when the user is not attending to it, the system will reduce susceptibility to eavesdropping when the user is actively reading the screen. PrivateEye can identify when unauthorized viewers are looking at the display, and take action to reduce potential eavesdropping. (Video demonstration)
Oculis Labs also sells a higher-priced version, Chameleon, which lets the user see clearly, and scrambles the view for others... all at the same time. Cool, eh?
