Googlers, get a privacy screen for your laptops

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/12/holiday-psa-googlers-get-a-privacy-screen-for-your-laptops.ars

by shawndumas • 16 years ago

69 39 16 years ago

ax0n3• 16 years ago

Everywhere I go, I see people who look at confidential information on laptops that are facing a crowdfull of eyeballs. Better yet, many of them get up and leave for a smoke or a piss without locking their screen, leaving not only the juicy bits there for all to read but corporate hardware unattended and ripe for the picking. I also hear people divulge way too much information in public (usually while talking on a phone) such as routing numbers, credit card details and the like. People need more than a privacy screen. It's as if situational awareness is some kind of lost art.

Groxx• 16 years ago

How often is it exploited? Are preventative measures, which necessarily get in your way at some times to some degree, worth it given that probability?

ax0n3• 16 years ago

http://www.google.com/search?q=stolen+laptop&tbs=nws:1

qohen• 16 years ago

"I also hear people divulge way too much information in public...such as routing numbers, credit card details and the like...People need more than a privacy screen."

Would you believe...that technology to deal with this problem was actually invented in the sixties (for the intelligence community)?

And, while the original version was bulky, a portable version does exist. No doubt it could be updated for the 21st century.

Training Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUoT0a9Rkac&NR=1

(There's a wikipedia page about this tech also, if you care to look).

dazzawazza• 16 years ago

I friend of mine at Google UK was issued with a privacy screen for his standard issue laptop and told on day one that he MUST use it whenever in a public space.

It was quite good. Sitting next to him in the pub I could see about 5% of his screen.

cdibona• 16 years ago

Yep, that's how it goes. How embarrassing.

durin42• 16 years ago

I actually don't know anyone that was issued a privacy screen and told they had to use it. Sounds like a good policy though. (Just offering my own data point here.)

shawnee_• 16 years ago

I bet there is a decent-sized market with untapped demand for laptops / "tablets" (http://paulgraham.com/tablets.html) with a built-in privacy screen mechanism. The hardware itself could be the screen, either by making the screen part of the case itself, or through the display which would enable people to read only from certain angles.

kmfrk2• 16 years ago

The "privacy screen" is a physical polarization filter - basically a fabric you put on your screen however you like.

I don't know of any electrical/mechanical process that could shift the state of fabric to block light at most angles.

If you buy a crappy laptop from a couple of years ago, you won't even have to buy a filter to render your screen unreadable from an angle that isn't perpendicular to the screen. :)

jlees• 16 years ago

Everyone at Google who uses their laptop in a public place (heck, even on the company shuttle) should be using a privacy screen. However, doesn't mean that everyone is. :)

eli3• 16 years ago

When I was briefly a tech journalist, my boss showed me a great trick: Go to the lobby of the hotel during a conference and just listen. It's amazing how many people forget that others can hear everything they say into their bluetooth headset.

joezydeco2• 16 years ago

Forget the lobby, head to the bar. You get a lot more uncensored information and opinions after a few drinks.

eli3• 16 years ago

Very true. Even better are open-bar parties.

Here's my absolute favorite trick, though: Blow past the PR people, sales people, and models who typically staff tradeshow booths and find the lone engineer. Ask questions like, "What's your favorite cool feature that didn't make it into this release?" or "If you had 6 more months to work on it, what would you have done?"

Even engineers/product managers with some public relations training can't resist talking about that thing they spent months working on, but didn't make it into the final release.

rdl• 16 years ago

It is so weird being in the commercial world now where people basically don't seem to care about things like this. I never do anything on airplanes or in cafes except read books, watch movies, etc., or other public-source material. Even personal/social email seems too personal to have on a screen in a shared environment. Open plan offices shared with people outside my company are just as bad, but at least then it is sometimes possible to hide in a corner or telephone closet. I've often ended up going outside to sit in my car to make phone calls.

nigelk• 16 years ago

When I was there it was standard practice to use a privacy screen when at conferences or travelling, and they were delivered to your desk for free if you asked.

Some people just don't use common sense though.

niels_olson• 16 years ago

The legacy of pen-and-ink classification schemes comes with some flaws. In the military, if it's that important to be stamped, you shouldn't be reading it in a public square at all. But the "confidential" stamp is what made it seem juicy. Without that stamp, the journalist wouldn't have been interested.

But, like most classified documents, I think this also bears out just how much we over-secretize. I like Assange's view on this: we seem to use secrets to maintain our own positions within certain networks more than we use them for anything like "the greater good".

Hixie2• 16 years ago

The standards community is like this too. Just consider how many W3C working groups are secret, for example. You wouldn't believe how much push-back I get when I ask for everything to be public.

(The W3C even has a second level of secrecy known as "team", which even W3C members who pay $60,000+ every year don't get access to.)

pyre2• 16 years ago

I don't know the reasons that the W3C state, but I can see a reason for making some amount of the process behind closed doors: the 802.11 'pre-n' debacle. Vendors taking incomplete standards and running with them before they are mature enough to use. Of course there is also the opposite danger: vendors implementing their own 'standards' because the standards body is taking too long behind closed doors.

fleitz• 16 years ago

Next thing you know people will stop forgetting confidential documents in the printer.

kmfrk2• 16 years ago

They don't even have to do that; if the scanner has any sort of data storage, you can just check that out once in a while.

boredguy8• 16 years ago

Something like this privacy blanket, perhaps? For looking at "classified documents"?

http://4.media.todaysbigthing.cvcdn.com/99/79/8626236317aa13...

pangram• 16 years ago

Perhaps this is a problem that the Snazzy Napper folks should jump on!

reledi• 16 years ago

I could see some laptops overheating with that, besides it looking ridiculous and making your activity even more suspicious.

calbear81• 16 years ago

What about a software program that adds some type of filter layer on screen that can only be seen through special glasses that you purchase?

pyre2• 16 years ago

Whatever happened to the idea of making the glasses the display?

jonhendry2• 16 years ago

You can get them. They aren't especially pleasant to use.

chronomex• 16 years ago

A LCD with the front polarizer removed will be pure white to anyone not wearing polarized glasses, obtainable for $5 in the sunglasses aisle at most drugstores.

DufusM• 16 years ago

Wow, journalists are pretty much like smug spies. It is disconcerting that I have to be constantly distrustful of people around me just in case they are interested in digging around into any of the organizations I belong to.

_cbsz• 16 years ago

Not really -- either the information should be revealed to the public (in which case you don't have to be distrustful of them) or it shouldn't (in which case you should prevent them from learning).

poikniok• 16 years ago

"The Googler (I'll just use the masculine pronoun for convenience's sake) was sitting with his seat back up, while his neighbor's seat was leaned all the way back. This left a huge gap in between the seats, so that merely by looking straight ahead and turning my eyes slightly to one side I could see almost all of his laptop screen."

The author of this article is obviously lying, because if his seat was up and his neighbor's was back there would be no way to see his screen from behind. The author obviously didn't think this through well enough.

jonhendry2• 16 years ago

It might work if the writer was one row back and two seats to the side of the Googler, and the person in front of the writer had their seat back up.

Googlers, get a privacy screen for your laptops

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