The problem MeetInPeace v0.1 solves

The Problem

Upon the advent of Covid19 and a rise in Work From Home culture, and even during the pre-pandemic times where the video calls are very frequent and sensitive organisation data is shared among the folks, its risky in situations where people keep looking into your screen when you are attending the meeting / chat in let's say, a metro / hostel / crowded cafe etc. Not only risky, the peeping tom behaviour is a major cause of irritation among working class who like to travel and work / work in a cafe / someone who simply doesn't have the priviledge of privacy yet. So what to do for these?

Existing solutions

This calls for a easy but viable solution to counter all these peeping toms. Some are already in the market like a 2500 INR Filter Screen, or locking your screen everytime someone looks at your laptop, or asking them to shoo away and handling awkward questions like "What is it that you are doing that you have to hide it?"

Our Solution

These solutions are not really the best ones, so why not identify certain points of senstivity in the webapps (like gmeet, zoom and slack, which we have handled specifically in this project) and simply blur them! To reveal / unblur them, all you need to do is hover over it. To keep the solution as accessible and compact, we chose a browser extension - MeetInPeace (which is of size < 1 MB)

To make the accessibility even quicker, all you need to do is use "Alt + X" as the hotkey to toggle this extension On / Off to keep your privacy secure quickly.

How it works?

We blur the sensitive areas on toggle using custom CSS and DOM manipulation, which is initiated on

onCheck

listeners attached to the popup.

Final Aim

Our aim is to make this solution more accessible to everyone, for that we can't really make a custom tab for each webapp in our extension.
So, our final aim is to allow the user to mark the specifc areas of the web page as sensitive areas and toggle blurring / unblurring them as required.

Challenges we ran into

Major Challenges was ideation

• Initially thought about blurring the entire screen into CSS grid and hovering over certain elements to unveal them, but complete screen blur will attract more attention than necessary. Hence dropped.
• Which 3 sites to chose was a user coverage oriented decision wihle being time bound. We decided to drop Microsoft Teams and instead a messaging app "Slack" to show the usefullness in a text heavy channel.
• We wanted to keep the size as small as possible and that required us to not use any framework. We overcame this using pure html, js and css stack and managed to reduce the size to 1MB
• Handling intern calls with this project's development was also a hurdle :)