Researchers have created an LED light bulb to disrupt the image a phone camera takes
As developers turn smartphones into more versatile tools, their owners want to bring these devices everywhere. Though this sometimes leads to invasions of privacy, such as someone taking a picture of themselves in a public restroom or a locker room while other occupants used their facilities under the belief they had a level of a privacy. Researchers from the University of California, San Diego, want to lessen the range of a smartphone’s camera with the creation of an LED called LiShield.
While the LiShield provides a perfect amount of a light for a human, it distorts and causes problems for cameras by causing an off-and-on series of black lines across the screen when someone tries to take a picture. The LEDs do this by giving off a specific waveform the camera can pick up, but a person cannot. The camera detects these waveforms through the sensors on the smartphone, causing the black stripes to show up on the screen. LiShield’s waveforms also make it difficult for the photographer to try and recovery the image in its entirety.
The distortion LiShield produces does not offer a uniform form of privacy or protection for someone changing. The strips only withhold part of the image, not the entire thing. An additional problem exists as the LED’s waveform gets interrupted when introduced to natural light, making it obsolete for outside areas. However, this technology the researchers created have made a step in the right direction to helping make it more difficult for someone to take an illegal recording. The waveform a LiShield produces can come with a barcode, which websites like YouTube can scan for to identify what videos they want to take down.
In the future, companies who want to optimize on providing a heavily private area could do so by reaching out to the hardware teams behind the smartphones. The two can find a mutual understanding to develop a variety of light that obscures more of the image, even making the camera inoperable during live events, such as comedy shows.
The researchers behind LiShield have a finished product, but do not have any current plans for a general release.