Who remember privacy screen filters? It was in the late 90’s I believe they became all the rage. You’d see these plastic frames clipped on to the front of a display making it difficult, if not impossible to see what was on the screen unless you were sitting looking directly at it.

The clip-on privacy filter morphed into a stick-on filter that did the same job, but they aren’t very user friendly and permanently alter the view of the screen. The super paranoid among us won’t need to worry about sticking anything to a display to achieve privacy for much longer, though. HP has come up with an alternative built directly into the screen.

HP has teamed up with 3M to develop a privacy filter that is added during manufacturing so that it’s permanently available. Better yet, this filter can be enabled and disabled at will. You’ll just need to know the appropriate keyboard shortcut to turn it on or off.

Modern LCD screens have viewing angles of around 170-degrees, meaning regardless of where you stand you can probably see what’s on the screen quite clearly. HP and 3M’s filter restricts the light allowed to escape from the sides of the display meaning the viewing angle is reduced down to just 70-degrees. So only the person using the laptop should have a clear view.

HP plans to add the privacy filter screen to its business laptops by mid-2017, so you’ve still got almost a year of using stick-on privacy filters or choosing your locations widely for viewing sensitive information. Chances are if the privacy filter turns out to be a hit it will soon make its way into other brand laptops. Maybe one day it will be a standard feature of all displays.