ADAM ENGST 19 May 2026
I’ve never been one for working at a coffee shop or in other public spaces, but lots of people—particularly students—often find themselves in situations where someone could be surreptitiously watching what you do over your shoulder. That could be a problem if you’re working with confidential or sensitive data, or just something that you would be embarrassed if someone else read. If shoulder surfing concerns you, there’s now a solution.
EyesOff, a menu bar app by indie developer Yusuf Mohammad, uses your Mac’s webcam to detect whenever someone else is looking at your screen and alerts you instantly. It offers two detection modes: Face mode simply detects any face in view, while EyesOff mode goes further by detecting whether faces are actually looking at your screen. You can adjust detection sensitivity and specify how many additional faces are necessary to trigger the warning (perhaps you regularly work with a friend or colleague, so you’d be worried only about a third face being detected).
Whenever EyesOff detects a face, it can show an unmissable alert in the center of your screen, post a standard notification, or launch another app. You can customize the alert’s size, text, color, and opacity, or switch to full-screen mode, which has the added advantage of obscuring whatever is on your screen. The alert can disappear automatically or require manual dismissal. EyesOff also offers a “rear view mirror” option that displays a small window of what the webcam sees when it detects a new face, and it can even launch another app in response to face detection. What you see below is the app’s main window; normally, whatever you’re working on would be underneath the EYES OFF alert, and the rear view mirror window would appear in the corner of the screen.
What about an unattended Mac? In theory, if you’re working on confidential data, you should have the display turn off or start the screen saver after a few minutes of inactivity. But if you were called away from your desk and a nosy colleague came by before the inactive timer elapsed, they would have access to your Mac. We may not have Face ID for the Mac yet, but EyesOff offers a basic level of face authentication. You enroll your face, and whenever it detects someone other than you looking at the screen for more than about 5 seconds, it locks the screen. Since you wouldn’t know who was looking at your Mac when it was unattended, EyesOff offers an option to take snapshots whenever it triggers and keep them for a user-specified number of days.
Although I seldom compute in public, EyesOff worked fine during my testing, and when I was at the ACES Conference last week, it triggered correctly when someone was looking over my shoulder. Of course, I was working with them on something, so I had to quit the app temporarily, but Yusuf is considering adding a button that would let the user prevent the alert from appearing for a user-configurable number of minutes to address legitimate co-working situations.
EyesOff relies on a lightweight AI model for face and gaze detection, but I noticed no performance slowdowns, admittedly on an M4 Pro MacBook Pro. All processing takes place on the Mac—no data ever leaves the machine—and the app doesn’t record or store video.
Yusuf has been extremely responsive to feedback, converting the initial version he showed me into a menu bar app, adding face authentication, and fixing bugs associated with my somewhat unusual three-camera Mac (a MacBook Pro with two Studio Displays). Nonetheless, EyesOff is still young and in active development, so I’ve encountered a few glitches, and you might too. Yusuf has resolved all of mine so far, but EyesOff will undoubtedly continue to mature in the coming months. If EyesOff would give you some peace of mind while working in public or leaving your Mac unattended in your office, I encourage you to give it a try. It offers a 14-day free trial—no credit card necessary—after which it costs £13.99 (about $19) per year. There’s also a Windows version.
