New app catches strangers that stare at your phone screen over your shoulder

The Electronic Screen Protector will interrupt whatever you’re doing and show live footage of the offender on your handset

(YouTube/Hee Jung Ryu)

Google researchers have built an app that can catch people when they try to stare at your phone screen without you noticing.

The system, which they’ve named the Electronic Screen Protector, is designed to help you protect your privacy in public.

It can detect a gaze almost instantly, and can also recognise individual faces.

The app, which has been developed by Hee Jung Ryu and Florian Schroff, uses your phone’s front camera to see what’s going on behind you.

If it catches someone looking at your phone, over your shoulder when you're on a bus or train for instance, the Electronic Screen Protector will interrupt whatever you’re doing and show live footage of the offender on your screen.

To avoid any uncertainty, a red box will also surround their head and a message will appear beside it reading, “Stranger is looking alert!!!”

Furthermore, it will show a stream of rainbow vomit flowing out of their mouth.

According to the researchers, who will present their work at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 2017 conference next month, the app works under a variety of light conditions and with different head poses.

They say it can detect a gaze in two milliseconds, and recognise a face in 47 milliseconds.

Though the researchers are yet to provide technical details of the system, ZDNet reports that it likely combines the powers of FaceNet, a facial recognition neural network, and GazeNet, a gaze-estimation neural network.

“Because of the quick, robust, and accurate gaze detection mobile model we can now easily identify the face identity and gaze simultaneously in real time,” the researchers wrote.

“Hence, the application, an electronic screen protector, can enable its enrolled users to continue reading private and confidential contents on your mobile device, while protecting their privacy from onlookers in a crowded space such as the subway or an elevator.”