Sounds like a great product, but who in their right mind would work on confidential or sensitive documents in a public place like a coffee shop?
I agree but there are a lot of people in a “wrong mind” everywhere! One of the most memorable for me was at a baseball game. I watched the guy sitting in front of me open a new bank account, transfer money to it from another bank, link Venmo, and pay bills. If they had been richer, I wouldn’t be typing this right now. I’d be on my tropical island waiting for the private jet to arrive.
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Thank you! I agree but there are cases where people might just not want others to see their screen in public, or when by mistake or necessity it’s not possible to get to a private space before you open a sensitive document
Thanks for sharing the anecdote, this is exactly why we built the app.
To be honest even I wouldn’t have expected someone to be that lax with their screen privacy.
This utility is close to “A solution in search of a problem”. Still, I wish Yusuf GOOD LUCK with it.
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thanks for this - on mobile devices - could be super too for shoulder surfing.
am i missing it but the pricing does not seem to be listed on the app web page?
thanks
m.c.
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Hi m.c., thank you for the comment. Agreed it would be very powerful on mobile devices, I hope one day we can bring it to that platform.
My apologies if it is not clear, but you can find pricing in between the two sections: customer story and download buttons. (it is 13.99 per year, with a 14 day free trial)
I think it’s hard for those of us who don’t do it to realize, but a vast number of people, probably more in cities where people live in small apartments, do a of work in coffee shops. (I was just listening to a Planet Money podcast where the author of their new book was saying how he worked in one.) And students very often work in public situations.
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I had a friend who had to work in a coffee shop because of the noise. He found the silence at home deafening and couldn’t focus.
This baffled me, as I am the opposite. I can’t imagine getting anything done with all those distractions.
But I later discovered there’s an iPhone app that will generate “coffee shop” white noise (muffled conversation, clinks of cups, coffee pouring, doors opening and closing, etc.) for people who want that noise at home!
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Interesting you bring that up.
How ironic is that realization after everybody and their dog cried about how they wanted to (not to mention how they were entitled to) “working remote”. Just go to the office like a normal person. No more tiny home office vs. barking dog. No more I couldn’t find the unmute button. No more coffee shop drama. No more privacy nightmare. Done.
And to those who then want to whine about long commutes or CoL or whatever else the universe supposedly owes you, as Gen-X I have this to say to you: it’s called life, deal with it. You will always have to make choices and compromise. You cannot have it all. Making those choices and dealing with the outcome, that’s your responsibility. Nobody owes you a damned thing. And when every once in a while something has to give, well you don’t throw a tantrum over it. You suck it up and you march on. That’s what most of us learned (or should have learned) when we turned 6.
Allow me to introduce my expansive Led Zeppelin collection.
Or, Blind Guardian, if you’re my brother in law. 
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As much as I suspect many of us agree with @Simon’s “get off my lawn” sentiment 
, let’s stay on the topic of EyesOff and preventing shoulder surfing. The world is a complex and ever-evolving place.
Joanna Stern (former tech columnist at the WSJ) recently started her own column, and she has a piece this week on methods to combat shoulder surfing. This particular article is behind a paywall, so I don’t know if she covered EyesOff, but here is a quick excerpt:
I’m typing this on a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 with a feature I wish every laptop had.
Looking at the screen straight on, it seems like your everyday 14-inch display. But if you were sitting next to me at this coffee shop or in a cramped coach seat, you wouldn’t be able to see much. It’s like one of those stick-on privacy shields, except built right into the laptop’s display. No plastic sheet to snap on and off. No weird gaps between screen and protector. No “why does my $2,000 laptop look like it’s wearing a pair of discount transition lenses?”
If you follow tech news closely, you also know this sort of technology is already coming to phones. The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra has a Privacy display. Enable it in settings and the screen becomes harder to see from an angle. I love it. I wish my iPhone 17 Pro had it. Sadly, it doesn’t so I now have a plastic privacy protector covering my screen.
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I don’t know. That guy on the right in the demo pic looks exceptionally seedy! 
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What I need is CatsOff! I have become the owner of a cat (my wife was dying for one), and it loves to walk on my keyboard. I wish I could use the camera to lock the keyboard PRONTO when it saw a huge wall of fur in front of the camera. 
The five-second-without-my-face thing might help, but she can hit a lot of keys in 5 seconds.
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You’d be surprised. Back in 1999 during the bubble, I went into the press room of an optical technology conference to find a group of people sitting and plotting how they were going to start a company. I recognized at least one of them. They took no notice of me and went on talking. I was there as a reporter, but I didn’t recognize anything important was underway, and wandered away after a little while. Only later did I realize that they were probably in discussions of one of the major mergers that formed JDS Uniphase, which was a major multi-billion-dollar company at the peak of the bubble.
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Thank you for sharing! Her article is really interesting, I also am not subscribed but it was insightful to read about the anecdotes about SFO airport.
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haha, if I get the chance I’ll add an easter egg mode to do exactly that!
(a super quick work around, set the parameter “activate after no faces for (s): to 1” then when your face leaves the screen for a second as soon as the cat touches the keyboard, bamn screen locked.)
Those screens typically aren’t actually polarized, but use a “micro-louver” technology. I spend a lot of time on airplanes, often on my phone (when I’m too lazy to get the MPB out), and I have one of the Zagg micro-louvered privacy screens on my Pixel 10 Pro. It does slightly dim the screen, even at boresight, but – speaking as someone who LOVES a bright screen – it’s negligible. It’s also terrific for privacy on airplanes, as being even slightly off-boresight renders the screen nearly dark to completely dark. That said, it darkens the screen only in azimuth; if someone is literally looking over your head, that person will be able to see the screen as clearly as you can.
I love the Zagg privacy screen protector.
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off-boresight?