Someone peeking at your phone screen? New Google tool will alert you

Google researchers have come up with a unique tool which alerts you when other people are peeking at your smartphone screen.

The tool, spotted by The Android Soul, isn’t available yet but is set to be demonstrated at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference next week.

As for how it all works? The phone’s front facing camera is used to detect gazes and faces, doing so very quickly and alerting users in the process. The application draws a red box around the Peeping Tom and also adds a rainbow effect for good measure.

“The runtime is 2ms (milliseconds) per face for gaze detection, 47ms per face for face recognition, and 115ms per frame for face detection in average,” the team explained on the NIPS website.

Oddly enough, it’s not the first time we’ve seen an app for this scenario. BlackBerry developed the Privacy Shade for its smartphones, allowing you to only read a small portion of your screen to prevent peeking.

Anyway, check out the video demonstration below.