Microsoft could revolutionize privacy with visual encryption eye-tracking

Privacy is becoming more and more paramount in today's market of devices and software, with consumers looking now more than ever for privacy-focused products, or at least features in existing products.

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A recently published Microsoft patent may have given us a look into the future of privacy when it comes to documents, or even just pages of text for that matter. The new patent describes a new type of encryption technology that makes it impossible for anyone to read the text that is on a device's screen that isn't the user of the device. The technology takes the text on the screen and encodes it, modifying letters and then combining it with the original body of text.

Next, the system uses eye-tracking technology to display only the encoded version of the document in the peripheral view of the reader while also making the focus point clear for reading. From the perspective of someone trying to read the text on a device, they would see a page full of jumbled letters and words that wouldn't make any sense. From the perspective of the reader, wherever they are looking in the body of text they would see clear writing.

At the moment many privacy solutions attempting to solve this same problem of visual hacking are attempting to blur all text on a document, but besides where the reader is looking. While this does sound similar, and in ways it is, the blurring effect is akin to reading to trying to text through a telescope.