Don’t you hate when people read over your shoulder? When you’re using a laptop in public, there’s always some guy wanting to take a peek and see what you’re doing. Even if you’re just watching some videos on Youtube, it can be a nuisance to have a bunch of nosy neighbours getting into your business.
Penn Jilette, of the magic duo Penn & Teller, has developed his own method for discouraging laptop snoops, which he shares in his magic book “How to Play in Traffic”: writing a pretend email to his girlfriend about the time he spent a year in prison for assaulting a man for reading over his shoulder.
If you just want people to butt out, and you’d rather not scare them half to death, though, you can just spend a few bucks on a laptop filter.
Laptop filters are simple screens you can attach to your laptop screen that make it so that only the person sitting directly in front of the laptop can see what’s onscreen. People sitting to the side or looking at the screen at an angle will only see black.
What you want to look for in a laptop filter is probably going to be convenience. You can find them in just about any size, and they’re all, more or less, equally effective, but some are a little more cumbersome. 3M makes some wonderful laptop filters, though. The 3M Laptop Privacy anti-peek filter is self adhesive, and it will stay in place when you close the laptop. Others might need to be clipped on and removed every time you close your laptop.
Why bother with a laptop filter? If you don’t mind people watching over your shoulder while you check your email, who cares, right?
The real reason it might be wise to invest in a laptop filter is for more practical reasons of privacy, besides just that you don’t like looky loos. We do just about everything on our computers these days. We pay bills, shop online, register for credit cards, etcetera. You have a lot of private data on your screen. If you don’t really use your laptop for much beyond basic internet browsing and so on, it doesn’t really matter, but if you plan on using your laptop to do anything requiring that you bring up private data onscreen, a filter is a good idea.
Identity theft has been slightly blown out of proportion, but, it is a real problem, and it is on the rise. More often than not, you can take your laptop anywhere you want and not worry about someone standing behind you with a pen and a notepad, but it’s that one stranger in a thousand who actually is dishonest and dangerous. Using a laptop filter is a near-foolproof measure against having your identity stolen thanks to using your laptop in public.
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