The first Mac app that locks when you leave and hides when someone looks.
Introducing Avalw Shield, the world's first Mac app that locks when you leave and hides when someone looks.
No other Mac app has ever done this:
✅ Detects when YOU leave, locks automatically
✅ Detects when someone ELSE looks, hides your screen instantly
✅ Detects when YOU return, unlocks with your face
No timer. No shortcut. No button. No effort.
Just your Mac responding to your physical presence, the way it always should have.
Three layers. One app. Zero effort.
- Away Lock
The moment you leave your desk, not after a timer, not after a shortcut, the moment your face disappears from the camera, your screen locks. Default is a few seconds. Configurable to your environment. Open office? Make it faster. Home? Make it slower. It adapts to you.
- Shoulder Guard
Shield doesn't just count faces, it detects attention. Is that person actually looking at your screen, or just walking past? It knows the difference. You can configure Shoulder Guard to detect up to 5 faces at once, perfect for open offices, busy cafes, or any space where more than one person could glance your way. The moment unauthorized attention is detected, your content disappears behind a neutral overlay. They look away, it's back. The entire cycle: under a second. Silent. Invisible. Automatic. And it cannot be fooled by a photo or a video playing on a phone screen. Shield analyzes depth, micro-movements, and gaze direction. Only a real, three-dimensional, living face triggers a response.
- Face Unlock
Shield learns your face and gets smarter every time you use it. New glasses? Different haircut? Grew a beard? Dimmer lighting? It adapts. If recognition fails five times in a row, it falls back to your system password. Security is never compromised for convenience.
Real situations where Shield changes everything.
You are in a cafe working on a confidential project. A stranger sits next to you and glances at your screen. Shoulder Guard detects the extra pair of eyes and hides your content instantly. They only see a neutral overlay. They look away, everything comes back. You never had to do a thing.
You step away from your desk at the office for five minutes. You do not press a shortcut. You do not set a timer. You simply walk away. Your screen locks the moment you leave. You come back, sit down, your face is recognized, your session is waiting exactly as you left it.
You are on a Zoom or WhatsApp call and a colleague walks behind you to glance at your screen. Shoulder Guard hides your content while you continue the call normally. And here is something important: Shield is completely invisible to your video call. It works alongside Zoom, WhatsApp, FaceTime, Teams, or any other app that uses your camera. There is zero conflict. Shield does not interfere with your calls, does not compete for camera access, and when another app takes control of the camera, Shield gracefully pauses and resumes the moment it becomes available again. As if Shield does not exist.
100% on-device. No cloud. No servers. No data. Ever.
Here is exactly what happens with your camera feed every single frame:
→ Frame captured
→ Processed in volatile memory, RAM only
→ One integer extracted: how many faces are visible
→ Raw pixels discarded immediately, in milliseconds
→ Nothing written to disk. Nothing sent over the network.
Shield has no backend. No API server. No cloud service. No analytics. No telemetry. No database anywhere on the internet that stores anything about you. The application runs entirely on your Mac. This is not a privacy policy promise. It is an architectural fact. There is simply no networking code in the application. It does not know how to connect to anything, because it was never given the ability to.
Shield sends zero bytes over the network. Not low numbers. Zero.
You can verify this yourself:
1. Open Activity Monitor, find Shield, check the Network tab, 0 bytes sent, 0 received
2. Install Little Snitch or Lulu, Shield will never trigger a single outbound alert
3. Search your entire filesystem for images Shield created, you will find none
4. Disconnect your Mac from the internet entirely, Shield works perfectly, because it never needed the connection
The camera LED on your Mac is controlled at the hardware level. It is physically impossible for any software to access the camera without the LED turning on. When Shield is monitoring, the LED is on. When you quit Shield, the LED turns off immediately.
When Shoulder Guard hides your content, that overlay is rendered using a protected window layer. Third-party screen recording software, screenshot utilities, and remote desktop tools cannot see through it. What is hidden from the person behind you is also hidden from any capture mechanism running on your machine.
Available in 24 languages, with tutorials included so setup takes less than a minute.
Avalw Shield is live now on the Mac App Store. Windows version is coming soon to the Microsoft Store.
If you use a Mac and you have ever worked from a cafe, left your desk without locking, sat in an open-plan office, shared a computer at home, or traveled and worked from airports or hotels, this was built for you.
Try it. Just 15 minutes. You will understand why this needed to exist.
🔗 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/avalw-shield/id6760089663
Read more - https://avalw.ai/blog/avalw-shield/
Avalw - https://avalw.ai
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Avalw Shield : The world's first Mac app that locks when you leave | Product Hunt
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