Maybe you’re sitting on a subway, or a plane awaiting take off. You glance over at your neighbor’s phone screen — innocently, of course. But instead of a glowing feed of TikTok videos or the draft of an email, you’re met with a seemingly inert black screen, though this person’s thumbs are swiftly tapping it.
It’s like a slap on the wrist, a “keep out” sign, a trap set for nosy people who can’t resist snooping on other people’s phones. It’s a privacy screen, an accessory for phones and laptops designed to significantly darken or totally obscure their surfaces to wandering eyes.
Lately, the screen protectors have become a common sight in densely populated public areas. They have become particularly popular among people with sensitive professions, like doctors and therapists, who must be cautious about their patients’ personal information when working outside their offices.
But at a time when it has become normal to assume a level of surveillance in public places — not just by security cameras, but by our fellow travelers in this mortal coil who may turn us into internet content — the screens have become more appealing to the average person, too.
“I don’t like people looking at my stuff,” said Shanaisa O’Neal, who on a recent afternoon was scrolling her phone, its screen visible only to her, as she rode the F train in Manhattan with her daughter.
Ms. O’Neal said she bought a screen protector after catching an older man “naturally” looking over at her phone one day while riding the subway. As someone who occasionally checks her bank account in public and keeps photos of her home and her children on her phone, she felt the privacy shield was necessary.
When asked if she ever looked at the screen of a person sitting next to her, she said that her eyes “may” drift in that direction, but that she has never looked at someone else’s phone intentionally. She paused before continuing: “OK, maybe I have before.”
Even more than personal details like banking information, what some people say they’re most trying to prevent is someone seeing — and judging — the mundane ways they pass time scrolling.
“I waste so much time, especially on the phone, and the last thing I need is someone saying, ‘Oh, he’s on Instagram,’” said Guy Knoll, a 21-year-old comedian living in Gramercy Park.
He admitted that one of his favorite things to do for his own amusement is judge people on the subway for watching weird things in public, like “someone tweezing out a bullet” or “some dumb video of an animal.”
Poking fun at himself, Mr. Knoll admitted that any judgment of his Instagram habits, for instance, would probably be warranted “because it is a degenerate activity to just be on social media all day,” as he put it.
Some of that online content, typically tailored to suit a person’s tastes via “the algorithm” — our ominous shorthand for the calculations websites use to anticipate and predict our preferences — can seem more revealing than a passport when it’s exposed to strangers.
According to Leslie John, a behavioral scientist and professor at the Harvard Business School who studies privacy decision-making, what we choose to post is one facet of ourselves that we want other people to see. But what is regurgitated back to us by social media algorithms, which are becoming “scarily good” at understanding users, may reveal what we actually care about.
“That is much more revealing to someone because we’re not censoring it,” she said. “It feels more personal because it is more personal.”
Oh right — how do those algorithms know us so well? It’s because most phone users are forking over tons of data and personal information to tech companies every time they download an application or search online. Yet somehow the stuff we want to keep the person sitting next to us from seeing — our messages or the algorithm-driven content that ends up on our feeds — has become a locus of some people’s privacy concerns. Is it performative? A grasp for a comforting, yet false, sense of control? Both?
Psychologists refer to this mismatch, in which the value people place on privacy seems to be contradicted by their behavior, as the privacy paradox.
Dennis Stolle, the senior director of American Psychology Association’s office of applied psychology, said the privacy screen was an example of people exerting their value for privacy in a situation where they know they can immediately and tangibly control the space around them.
“You can put that privacy screen over your laptop or your phone and feel a sense of accomplishment,” he said. “Even though in the big picture that may be the least of your worries, it still is somehow psychologically satisfying to do something to protect the value that you hold of the importance of privacy rather than doing nothing at all.”
As a creative arts therapist, Karen Codd said she was “primed” to be protective of the communications she has as part of her job as well as in her personal life.
At the same time, she noted that there was some cognitive dissonance with her life online.
“For example, I just described the importance of confidentiality, but I’m also a therapist who has a dating profile,” said Ms. Codd, 44. “If I want to be a person connected to culture or able to socialize or meet new people I have to be vulnerable in some respects.”
On a subway platform at the West 4th Street station in Greenwich Village, Varun Punater pushed his index finger across his darkened smartphone filter that was peeling and cracked from longtime use. The main reason he started using a privacy protector nearly four years ago was to jokingly spite a friend who had bought one first.
“It’s kind of stupid, but I couldn’t see what he’s up to and I’m a snoopy person, so then I was like, you know what, I’m going to get one, too,” he said.
He liked the sense of security it gave him, especially while on public transit, but acknowledged that it doesn’t compare with how his personal data is being used online without his permission.
“I mean, it’s always like a give and take with privacy,’ said Mr. Punater, 23 and a computer science major at the University of Southern California. “What you choose to give up right now is out of your hands.”
Aside from their inability to protect users from more sizable violations of their privacy, the screen protectors have some downsides. Almost all of the dozen-plus commuters interviewed for this story said the privacy screens made it difficult to text, to see images clearly and to take photos.
In one respect, they said, the product worked almost too well: It is extremely difficult to show someone else something on your phone.
“Honestly it’s more annoying than anything else,” said Remy Kriz, 25, who had just gotten off the C train at 14th Street. “It’s got to be at the right angle, and it’s all a little cumbersome from time to time.”
Gina Cherelus covers dating, relationships and culture for The Times and writes the weekly dating column Third Wheel.
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