Smartphone is nowadays one of the most important, if not -the- most important, every day use objects in our lives. It is a great multitool thatnot only serves as a mean to complete multitude of tasks, but also holds various important information about its user. Browsing history, text messages,bank account info and more can be collected from our device if anyone gets their grubby hands on it. Still, many of those things do not require an evilhacker to take hold on our phone and crack its security – lots of info can be stolen by people simply peeking over your shoulder. To that, Google says “No”.

Google engineers are working on a system that will alert the phone’s user if anyone tries to look at our phone’s screen. During the Neural Information Processing Systemsconference that will take place next week, ones Hee Jung Ryu and Florian Schroff will present their idea for an electronic screen protector. Their project is said to use the combination of the Google Pixel’s selfie camera and a specialized artificial inteligence in order to detect anyone trying to steal a glance at our private business. Schroff and Ryu promise that their program can recognize a stranger’s face in just two milliseconds, no matter the person’s angle, pose and the surrounding lighting. In order to achieve this, engineers are using TensorFlowLite, Google’s latest AI.

I like that idea. Instead of giving us a gimmick that no one really cares about (ehm ehm, Huawei and its squeezable phone, ehm ehm), Google plans on introducing something that will be actually useful. I do not use my phone outdoors very often, but when I do I often wonder if someone’s peeping on what I am doing on it. With Google’s sneak peek detector, that First World problem will be a thing of the past. Neat.