Privacy Screens For iPhones? New Patent Reveals Apple Is Working On Making Shoulder-Surfing Harder

In a bid to enhance user privacy, Apple Inc. AAPL is said to be developing cutting-edge screen technologies for its iPhone and Mac displays. The objective is to make it increasingly difficult for unauthorized viewers to see what’s on the screen.

What Happened: Apple is actively exploring ways to maintain privacy on the high-resolution displays of their devices. Recently granted patents provide insight into the different strategies the tech giant is considering, reported Macrumors.

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The “Privacy films for curved displays” patent proposes a coating layer on the screen that limits light direction. This ensures that only users situated directly in front of the screen can see the full retina quality and brightness of the display. This design could potentially blur the display for anyone trying to view the screen from the side.

Nonetheless, this does not address the problem of someone standing directly behind the user. To counter this, Apple has suggested a subtler approach in another patent, “Displays with adjustable angles of view.” This concept entails modifying the display’s viewing angle, potentially through an “electrically controllable filter,” which allows users to adjust screen polarization.

The suggested privacy mechanism incorporates a series of substrate layers into the display itself. A screen using this technology could potentially include an additional layer of liquid crystal between these layers, featuring a color filter to limit certain colors to only the user.

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