A new photo-sharing app uses a common optical illusion to make your sent snaps a lot harder for the receiver to screenshot!
Yovo - You Only View Once - is a photo-messaging app that allows you to capture photos, add text, and share by posting socially or messaging another Yovo user, which brings an interesting technology to the table.
It's called D-fence, and is based around the idea that your eyes can see what's behind a slatted fence as you're driving by at a high speed.
Popular photo sharing app Snapchat may notify you when the recipient of your image takes a screenshot -- but in the first place it doesn't actually make it harder to grab that screenshot.
The new iOS app Yovo is looking to make a change; created by privacy software company ContentGuard, it uses a new solution to protect your snaps from screenshots: because it can't do anything about controlling user behavior, it uses an optical illusion on the images themselves.
The illusion it uses called the Barrier Grid illusion. This is similar to what you might experience driving past a picket fence: as you speed past, your eyes tend to see the stationary scene behind the palings, rather than the palings
When you take a picture, the app covers a blurred grille over the image. When the receiver opens the image, the grille moves, allowing them to see the picture, but if they try to take a screenshot or a photo of the screen, it will always result in an image with blurred sections.
ContentGuard's product head Scott Richardson said, "Everyone is becoming more conscious of the digital trail they leave. It seems as though there isn't a day that goes by where we don't see a headline about the consequences of inadvertent or malicious digital publication of our private lives."
"Let's face it -- not every moment or message is meant to be shared or stay online forever. Yovo represents a new way to create and share photos and messages in a more private, fun and interactive way," he added.
The app also allows you to send photos from your camera roll, selectively blur portions of an image. You can choose who sees what and for how long, and set a self-destruct timer on messages and photos from one second to up to 24 hours.
This technology doesn't prevent the ability for screenshots to be captured. Instead, what it does is obscure them by making the resulting screenshots almost entirely unusable.
As for whether the company keeps and stores user images, it only does for the duration you select, and it uses a proprietary file format that can only be viewed from within the app. It also uses 256-bit AES encryption to keep your images safe.
ContentGuard say D-fence still needs work, as the lines are certainly noticeable with the naked eye. But Richardson says a new version, due out next month, is currently being put together that increases the framerate of the lines and gives off much less of a flicker.
Yovo is available on iOS devices from the Apple App Store and will soon be available for Android on Google Play. You can download Yovo for free from the iTunes app store, and check out a video of how it works below.
