How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots(timmarinin.net) |
How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots(timmarinin.net) |
(a) the freedom to screenshot any content on your own device (b) the freedom to share content with others that cannot be screenshotted
It can be annoying when DRM or privacy features block a screenshot, but I think it can also benefit the platform ecosystem that you participate in as a user too. Idk!
Does this indicate that the privacy feature has a gap, where you could reveal the length of your password if you take a screenshot mid app switch?
That said, operating systems should turn this into a user choice, and present a dialog to select the “protected” version or not.
It seems more appropriate for Claude to do it seeing as it generated the image, all Bluesky did is provide the platform to post it.
Oh, so you can take screenshots of the content that tries to avoid it if you do it mid-switch?
If it's reliable and WONTFIX, that's almost enough to get me to switch away from Android.
Screenshot taking prevention is harmful and should not have ever been allowed to become a platform-level feature in the first place. Because if there's one rule of platform/client interaction, is that if you add a feature that can be abused against customers for stupid reasons, it will be. There's a number of apps I have on my Android phone that block screenshots for dubious reasons, that can be maaaybe charitably explained by calling them "growth hacking pretending to be a security feature", but in some cases even that's a stretch.
This feature should never have existed in the first place.
(At least Bluesky is open about it, both by being Open Source and calling out the "growth hack" by name in source code.)
What does the author mean by this? I checked the repo and the project seems to be MIT licensed, which makes it open source.
When iPhone shipped, any time you emailed a photo it would append "Sent from my iPhone" to try to virally market. Same or at least similar slimey tactics
https://github.com/mozzius/expo-privacy-sensitive/blob/main/...
The workaround is letting that person take a photo of my phone, which is lower quality.
Many people would find it inconvenient to find another device to take a picture with. And that manual picture would then have baked-in evidence that it was taken surreptitiously.
Locks keep honest people honest, as long as the app is up front about it and lets users make the choice, I don’t mind.
Nobody deliberately opted in to random information hiding in a more general purpose app, or watermarking, or DRM.
When I’m in Safari, taking a screenshot can turn into a totally separate operation (full page scrolling screenshot) and that’s a good feature.
Others complain about Google Maps showing a popup telling the user about location sharing upon screenshot - I think that makes a lot of sense, considering it doesn’t show up in the screenshot and dismisses easily.
I’m very harsh on user hostile choices, in fact I spend a lot of time ranting and raving about it, but I just don’t see that here.
Offering something better can be valuable (sometimes) but don't alter the screenshot itself.
I actually really like this approach. The action button isn't relevant in this context, and it doesn't occlude the content.
There's certainly situations where you wouldn't want this (ie if you're developing the app and you want to redesign starting from a screenshot), but for the average user I think this isn't overly hostile. I understand that people are dogmatically opposed to intent being modified, but I think you need to balance nuance. I actually enjoy having an attributable source in shared elements, and I think this is a low-impact way of achieving that.
It's a classic case of someone discovering a feature and thinking "hell yeah, so much security" without understanding or caring about UX impications.
I've yet to see someone saying "oh, I'm so glad my screenshot was blacked-out because I didn't realize I was in a banking app". It feels patronizing.
Yes, this. Payment apps, government apps, IM communications.
The other day I almost rooted my phone in anger trying to get around this, before pausing and realizing that this would only cause even more problems with those apps, thanks to remote attestation "features".
My favorite recent case, I almost locked myself out of mobile government services when changing phones recently[0], and it would've made for a stellar bug report showing when "fail safe" design can easily become "fail deadly"[1], with UI view of access and invalidation history clearly showing the timeline of a problem... if only I could take a screenshot of it. But I can't, because "much sekhurity".
--
[0] - Well, it's not really that big of a deal. With government services, there's always a way back. Might involve walking to a local civil affairs office or, worst case, a police station or a notary, but there is a way back. Big cloud services, on the other hand...
[1] - Invalidating a certificate prior to issuing a new one sounds like a good security idea, but in the real world fails critically if the two operations aren't an atomic group. In my case, issuing a new certificate failed, and I ended up walking around for half a day with old one invalidated and not even knowing it.
And just as important: Help your friends and family to move as well, so they can have ad blockers, NewPipe etc. We need a critical mass of users invested in their freedom, otherwise its going to be crushed by malicious/dumb security measures of their banking apps, corporate greed ("oh, a simple misunderstanding, when you clicked 'buy' you rented a limited license. Did you not read the ToS?") and police overreach. It's a perpetual battle.
It's also patronizing to ask during setup or whatever if the user is dumb enough to get scammed like this, even though that is kinda the actual piece of information needed
WARNING: You are in violation of the My Fios app end user licensing agreement that prohibits duplication of this screen. Please immediately delete this from your device.
... apparently buried in the app T&Cs is a "Distribution of the technician's picture or information is prohibited". Even if there's no tech assigned, the screen with the picture of the grey fake man with a fake hat apparently causes a big old warning if you screenshot it.
The text at the top of the screenshot is
> Eric Roston
> @eroston.bsky.social
So it's pretty easy to tell IMHO.
It somehow is perfect example of how modern software engineering feels to go astray for me. A feature in my device working completely in benefit of the one providing said software. I wish, and wish only I can, that this trend goes away at some point.
That was the expectation of using the product so it fits and isn’t anything like this discussion.
This deserves a longer rant, but the very premise of Snapchat was always poisonous, and is largely responsible for why, 20 years later, we're now facing extreme proposals for regulating electronic communication.
I generally disagree with the whole line of criticism techies get for "solving social problems with technology", but if there's one unambiguous case where I'd agree it was plain stupid, it's the concept of screenshot prevention, that became prominent with Snapchat. Controlling whether your recipient gets to keep the message you sent them is a purely social problem, and the answer to that in the real world has always, for good reasons, been "once sent, it's no longer yours; once received, it belongs to recipient to do with as they please".
Yellow.
They fuckin did it. Not construction not a warning of some type. Not yellow pages. Yellow - cool looking yellow.
Is what I said to myself as a 20-something product designer
"Forget watermarks, I'm just going to let the person know! Ha!"
Each time I tried to take a screenshot of a password, the password was missing from the screenshot - even when I kept the control centre pulled down far enough that the Password app was starting to look blurry.
At least on rooted Android devices you can bypass that.
Having a follow button on the screenshot brings nothing and a logo is helpful when sharing (“hey it’s not twitter, I know it looks like it but it’s bluesky”) and looks subtle.
It’s just it’s a forum so people say things for discussions sake and get outraged by anything that a platform they don’t like is doing.
42 of their 56 active users might not care about a watermark but god dammit do they respect it
And so should you
Their product UI kind of looks like X, so it's helpful to know the source of a post
I’m worried that switching apps and screenshots _doesn’t_ put the logo in. If the point of the switch is privacy, isn’t that a bug? Shouldn’t it apply the privacy screen during any screenshot? What if there was sensitive information on there when you were switching and taking the screenshot?
Second - I hate when my device keeps me from anything. I'm used to have control over my computer, and this is outrageous that I can't take screenshots of anything I want. There should be a god mode or something like that.
https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/664
Upvote the issue if so.
It’s so if an app is showing a password or bank account number or other piece of sensitive information it doesn’t accidentally end up in a screenshot. I think there are other places sensitive information won’t show.
Bluesky, and apparently others, are abusing the functionality for advertising purposes.
I think it’s a good thing it’s there. This functionality should be easy for apps.
I’d say this is one for app review or an App Store rule. But we all know those are a total joke.
This exists for a very bad reason.
>It’s so if an app is showing a password or bank account number or other piece of sensitive information it doesn’t accidentally end up in a screenshot.
and also coincidentally if the app is showing something incorrect that you want to be able to verify and provide proof of now you can't.
>I think it’s a good thing it’s there. This functionality should be easy for apps.
I think it's a bad thing it's there. The functionality should be easy for me.
Your banking app probably has an option to disable that because it's a legal requirement in so many places: People who can't see need to use assistive tools, and that includes screenshots and friends. If you are using a tiny/stupid bank in the US, file a ADA claim and get some money. In the EU check your Ombudsman.
No, it's so you can't screen-record Netflix. The bank doesn't care about that because it's not a liability issue to them, just fetishism; no way they pay Apple and Google for this capability.
Apple and Google should step in and allow users to remove these shenanigans with a little button on the screenshot preview screen, but resist this because of Netflix et al.
As it is, it is just an annoyance that requires you to do stupid workarounds like taking a photo of your screen.
Imagine if a password manager didn't allow you to copy the password since you might accidentally paste it somewhere incorrect.
"Secure inputs" take many forms, and it doesn't feel like this is abuse in any meaningful way
They find a good reason for every little piece of control or privacy they take from you.
Whatsapp also does this shit. You can’t screenshot a conversation (it comes back black). I am going Chinese for my next phone.
Because I assume most people want to take a screenshot because they want to capture something they are seeing in the app, most people probably are even annoyed to have the system indicators visible there.
> and now some apps get a hook to insert their branding.
No, apps can already insert their branding anywhere they want. They're writing the app. If they want their logo to be visible in screenshots, they have infinite ways to do that.
This particular way seems basically prosocial. It's much more useful to me as a consumer of the screenshot to see that it came from Bluesky than to see that there was a "Follow" button. It's not what the feature they're using was intended for, but I can't call it an abuse of the feature. What they're actually doing is good.
The fact that you're getting unexpected behavior isn't good. Sometimes you want to create a picture of sensitive information. You should be able to override the app developer's security settings.
Personally, I wish iOS didn't even facilitate this.
edit: to be clear, I don't think iOS should notify the app at all. The app could register areas as "invisible to screenshots" perhaps - I'm torn on that functionality.
Do you/should you (we) really expect that though? I regularly use color filters on my apple devices— grayscale to avoid distractions during the day and red tint at night. More recently I’ve been using the motion dots. I don’t know that I can say with confidence that I never want any of those “personal-perceptional-modifiers” to appear in a screenshot, but for most folks, I would guess it’s approximately never.
It is often important to people that the screenshot is an accurate record of what was on the screen.
Yes.
While we're at it, this "share" containing the copy/paste flow is the exact same kind of thing. And screw whatever logic decides to copy the URL of an image instead of the actual image sometimes from Safari when I select to copy it!
I guess the Bluesky bros got inspired by Threads, again.
The app knowing I took a screenshot feels adjacent to me to a keylogger. Imagine how many apps are capturing that information silently. To my mind, a screenshot is something that is happening outside of the app context, the app knowing about it is a security flaw imo.
To my knowledge, this is a misunderstanding. The app does not know that you are taking a screenshot, rather iOS knows you are taking a screenshot (as it must) and is excluding an element on display that has been designated by the developer as sensitive information. This is the same technology that prevents you from accidentally screenshotting your password manager; the developer has simply performed a nifty trick to display a small icon behind where the “follow” button would otherwise be displayed.
There are plenty of instances where this sort of thing can be annoying, such as when you try to screenshot a streaming service app and DRM enforcement leaves you with a blank screenshot, but IMO this particular instance is actually very tasteful; seeing “follow” on every screenshotted post is just useless noise, but a small unobtrusive platform icon is a useful reminder that the post came from Bluesky and not another very visually similar service like X(cancel) or Mastodon.
That is what this article is about and why you should read it before commenting. The whole point is that it doesn't need to know you're taking screenshots. That's why it's a clever trick.
If someone from Google Maps or LinkedIn team is here, please, when I take a screenshot it's because I want to a screenshot, not share the friggin location/post.
Not sure who got the idea that it was useful, it isn't.
If I'm sending a screenshot it's because I want to send exactly what I see on my screen and not have my recipient's gmaps instance happily recompute a route it thinks is better or leave out the routing information I included, or switch from biking to driving directions, or whatever else.
Just like their iCloud Keychain API that lets apps secretly track users across app reinstalls and device resets.
Oh wait it absolutely does.
Hijacking the screenshot process is a privilege that you ought to be able to revoke, it's insane to allow software to be given more control.
And don't tell me it's anything to do with security when it can be circumvented in any number of ways.
It should not exist as a control in the first place.
I know it may sound absolutist, but the way I see it: if you allow this as a user-revocable permission, then the very apps that need to be screenshotted by users most often will be the first to refuse to work at all unless you grant this permission.
Screenshotting is an system operations level feature. Apps should be neither aware of, nor able to interfere with, a screen capture being taken.
The toast shows up after the screenshot, but my phones's long screenshot feature captures the top part a second time, so the top part of the chat becomes unreadable.
You don't have to wish, in this scenario. Bluesky supports third-party clients, you can use one that has a more minimal featureset if you prefer.
Android and iOS should not let apps do this, because it can be (ab)used by apps that you can’t really choose not to use.
I know there’s a popular bank in my country that completely blocks screenshots and screen recordings on Android somehow.
It works! Unless:
- the person you’re linking it to doesn’t have an account on that platform
- you’re posting it in a chat, and the site doesn’t implement unfurls correctly
- the site shows a thumbnail on the link, but clicking on it gets hijacked by the “mAkE an aCcOuNt/ login here” shenanigans.
- you’re trying to link to something in context and the sites linking doesn’t support it
- the site is riddled with ads.
- the site is slow to load.
- you’re trying to save something and don’t want to have to load the site every single time in order to refer to it.
- any combination of the above.
Screenshots allows you to get a point in time reference to what you are sharing.
In 2026, we now know that the information can be edited, or completely removed for many reasons, some legitimate, and some nefarious.
Taking a screenshot is the easiest way to ensure the original is kept for folks to see. Frankly, it'd be even better if (a) the app can signal to the OS information about the url to the page for the screenshot, (b) timestamps were captured in the image and not cropped, and (c) the OS can authenticate the screen shot and digitally sign that it came from an unaltered device.
Screenshots are clunky and unideal, but at least they're fast and I know that they don't fail or break or send the wrong info to my contact.
If it were a one off message, this wouldn't be an issue, but if you zoom out on the issue and see you're sending up to a hundred messages a day, points of failure become major life frictions and you're trained out of using things like links in messaging apps.
and then when it does send I have no control over the presentation on the other side. Sites love to add some cringe "I love this app SOOOO much hearteyesemoji fire fire fire... sent from my iPhone, made with love in san cupertino" nonsense in my own voice - literally sending their words into my chats using my account, as though I had written their marketing dreck
Of course this is doable on open source OSes like GrapheneOS, it just sucks that you have to keep modifying the OS every time they release a new version
https://i.ibb.co/hRnn4ssF/2026-08-18-12-48-25.jpg
So yeah, I have a screenshot of the generic technician's ID photo, I guess.
Later on it did populate an actual name and photo when a human was assigned, but still, yeah, I don't get why they didn't just automatically redact it and just throw you the stupidest bullshit warning error ever on the honor system.
I also have no issue with the API, people here are definitely overreacting to it’s existence.
Sent from my Ryobi Riding Lawnmower
Wdym? Hooking (primarily underage) people onto "daily streaks" of sharing (often inappropriate) pictures of themselves to (sometimes random) other people via likely insecure servers is a _great_ business model!
Great customer retention. Lots and lots of engagement. So much shareholder value.
Oh and just think about how vulnerable they are. _Perfect_ for ads.
Why not ask contact for data via text and just copy paste it with double check?
For a short while, screenshots were a workaround for blocked copy-paste[0], as OCR (and, more recently, edge-deployed vision-enabled language models) would allow you to copy and paste any text from a screenshot. But guess what, now every other app is blocking screenshots!
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[0] - Which is the default on mobile apps, and unfortunately desktop apps too. I hate webshit applications, but if they have one redeeming grace, it's that by default, all text can be selected and copied, and it takes nontrivial engineering effort to break that, so most webapp vendors don't bother.
2. And even if you copy-paste the recipient's account number, that also relies on your counterparty not having mistyped their account number, so it would be nice for #1 to be possible to confirm the name.
So as much as a bank might agree with your stance on freedom of compute - they probably don't want to pay for it with actual money.
They really shouldn't be allowed to double down on it.
And arguably, half of it isn't even really security, it's about keeping you in their app. Application interface is the ultimate sales platform, and banks are making extensive use of that fact.
Great. Which one is sending a "do I know this person?" message to my friend?
Because it _used_ to be taking a screenshot.
> Taking a screenshot of the screen is not necessary.
Who are you to tell me what is necessary?
Seriously. What the fuck.
Someone who takes a screenshot of something, and gets anything other than a screenshot is potentially being harmed in ways you don't understand, and you say it isn't necessary like you know that or something?
The immediate technical problem is that OSes allow apps to declare what is "sensitive", and then follow those declarations unquestionably, preventing any preservation of that information.
The underlying social / political problem is that platform vendors allow app vendors to unilaterally declare what is and isn't sensitive, and proxy their opinion without question, and with no consideration for users and their context.
This is a failure of imagination for Apple, but it’s hard to blame them.
Who would think someone would put a button inside a “secure” text field and change the masked appearance to a logo?
If I was proposing this feature, I would never imagine someone would come up with something like that.
Should the phone identify those things and automatically blur out all of the sensitive information in those photos too?
I’d prefer if my phone did neither that nor told the apps that a screenshot was being taken nor allowing the apps to hide anything that was on screen when a screenshot is taken.
It’s my phone, I want to decide what I take photos and screenshots of.
That's the crux.
Yes, it is unreasonable, because scams have proven to be just as effective at getting people to just read the details out over the phone line, and bank these days are not showing much sensitive information in the open anyways (my recent annoyance - someone thought it's a good idea to never show the full account number on screen, showing just first and last few digits, and an option to copy to clipboard...).
Meanwhile, those very apps tend to be ones people would most often want to screenshot for legitimate reasons - e.g. to communicate or make a record of specific transactions, accounts, their states, metadata, etc. None of which is copyable text in the app, and most of it isn't even properly exportable, so it's not like there's any other way.
Done.
Just do a security alert pop up "You are screenshotting potentially sensitive information, are you sure you want to continue".
Imagine having to type "I want to get hacked" on a keyboard layout which randomizes with every character.
I agree this can be defined as cool and very very likely someone did this on their free time/prompted Claude on the side.
Very frustrating.
I think I must have changed my password several times thinking I just copied it wrong or it had special characters that weren't allowed, but nope, the truth was somehow stupider than that.
This feeling usually hits me at airports, with my shoes off and water confiscated. The terrorists won.
I doubt most people have a second phone on hand, ready and able to capture actual screen shots when your phone is preventing screenhots.
However, my idea happens to hit a very new limitation: for some reason, "privacy filters" are suddenly a thing. New phones have them built-in as some new magic display function, and for everyone else, there's this mad marketing push to get people to buy and use privacy foils in place of glass/foil screen protectors.
IDK what's up with those. Since when "shoulder surfing" with smartphones is a real problem, and why do marketers and product designers bet there's so much latent demand for it?
The "useful device" is a laptop.
In my view that's a feature, not a bug. I refuse to use services that break under "reasonable" conditions (non-chrome, ublock, no widevine, rooted, etc, etc).
Banks are the canonical example - changing one is a huge hurdle, with consequences that can drag on for years. One by one, they're all ditching their websites (if they had one in the first place) in favor of apps. Even those with full-featured websites increasingly force you to use their app as the second factor to log in, confirm transactions, even confirm viewing some data. Some offer physical tokens, most don't advertise that, and it's only a matter of time before they convince regulators that Attested Phones are Safer and Everyone Has One, and that option will disappear. And because they want their app to be the second factor, they can argue it needs to be secure, creating demand for remote attestation, and boom - there goes your option to work around any other bullshit limitation they throw at you.
The day has only 24 hours, I don't want to spend them clearing bushes by walking off the beaten path wrt. every single important service - payment services, government services, IM services, ${whatever bullshit SaaS app I need right now because you're using it for the thing you just shared with me, and I need to view that}, etc. So I submit. So does everyone.
It's why I put blame on platforms here. Features protecting the device from the user should not be built in the first place - they always start justified by some legitimate security reason, and always end up broadly abused to serve business reasons.
Right??
The same can be said wrt people being too careless to have their car/bike/etc. Or powertools.
In any of those cases, just try take them away and see how that goes…
Or, even if they add it, there's no way to save the file, only to "share" it, which 99% of the times isn't what I want, and I'm frankly tired of routing through the mail app as a workaround. At this point, at least on Android side, there exist apps whose sole purpose is to be a share target and dump the information to file (and being apps on an app store, chances are top 10 are just thinly veiled malware).
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.mateusrodcosta.apps.share2s...
The side button (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph7d116e557/io...) is on the exact opposite of the volume up button. Pressing the side button to shut down and lock the screen is something I do a lot. Press button (2) with the thumb and you will see that it is very natural to have your index or middle finger resting where the volume buttons are.
And occasionally I press hard enough with my thumb that the finger on the perpendicular side of the phone presses the volume up button and whoops I have taken a screen shot instead.
That said. I do consider this "feature" an abuse of privacy API:s, and I also often get annoyed that I cannot take screen shots of my bank app to for example send account information, or confirm a transaction, or report a graphical bug to the developers at the bank.
Now get off my lawn.
I don’t accidentally take screenshots very often, though it does happen.
I know multiple people who seem to take them constantly. It’s crazy. You and I may not do it, but I promise you there are people who do. LOTS of them.
Follow state is a useful bit of information. There's argument to be made for both hiding and preserving it.
There’s no need to implement a custom blur.
Good to hear it’s pretty straightforward on the dev side I guess, I can’t tell if this is a net benefit as a feature. I think my opinion is still rooted in user needs and I’d simply expect they are responsible for their screen shots and what sensitive info they may contain. So this feature as it exists is not a net good thing.
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This is absolutely hostile to users.
At least it's open source, so maybe one can add root access and screenshot blocking to it.
1. I need to be able to monitor what's inside the memory and communications of every process running if I want to
2. I need to be able to pin a different root certificate, install a MITM SSL proxy and see what every app is sending about me, if I want to
The only thing I could think of is if you want to browse TikTok or Instagram in public and don't want people seeing the weird shit that's on your algorithm, but even then, that's kinda weird.
It's not like computers give people a good reason to read the error popups. 90% of them these days are just "oops, computer pooped itself, a well trained army of monkeys is on its way to clean it up; try again later <tinyprint>0xbunchofbullshit-hexadecimal-uuids-for-vendor-telemetry</tinyprint> ;-)" anyway.
Most of the time, people are given only two options: give up on their task, or ignore the popup. No point in reading the message in such cases, it brings zero value.
Repeated exposure built immunity.
You get a scary error with incomprehensible details[1], maybe the app closes, so you open it again and continue until the next error happens; maybe it doesn't close, just keeps going - maybe partially broken, maybe not. Either way, text is incomprehensible, but dismissing the message lets you keep going, so you learn that. At some point you see the message, think "oh this again", and close it without thinking. Works 90% of the time, for the other 10% you have coping strategies like "press CTRL+S every 30 seconds", "use Save As instead of save", or "make a copy of the file at start of your work session" all committed to muscle memory.
The modals with two or more buttons were the annoying ones. Asking you to make a decision. Asking you to stop. Eventually you learned to press the right button for ones where it mattered, and go straight for [X] or "Cancel" for everything else. And it worked.
Then came the web, and that's a rant for another time, but suffice it to say, the advertisers successfully taught everyone that you should always click the "X" button on anything that pops up without reading it, way before web apps became a thing.
We've worked out some useful UX patterns since. Non-blocking notifications, side panes, undo, undo history (still annoyingly uncommon). I don't think there's a single solution to the problem, but I am sure of the underlying principle that should guide it:
Whatever you do, do not become an obstacle standing between the user and the thing they're trying to do.
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[0] - Can't speak for the kids these days, who learned computers after Windows ME times, or just grew straight into mobile revolution and mostly skipped dealing with PCs.
[1] - That was bad, but we've since overcorrected in the opposite direction. Ideal is IMO enough information to give you a clue about internal and external causes and state of the program, even if you have no technical background, because people bent on doing a task and even minimally curious can use that to random-walk into a solution. Basically: something you can act on as a user if you really care to.
They probably support proper export for business accounts. Business customers have leverage. Regular people? They're an annoying but necessary nuisance.
Or not: https://github.com/Kunzisoft/KeePassDX/issues/2321
They are imo clearly gearing up to lock down passkeys in practice one day so that you will only be able to use those tied to a Google or Apple account (or some new player). They're already threatening in these issues to blacklist open implementations that don't submit to their requirements, and then requiring an attested client would then become the "best practice" adopted blindly and widely. I think the only hope is for the open clients to fully submit, hoping to avoid full attestation, while not making it too hard to patch out the anti-features. Of course, anyone who can't compile is screwed though.
... have you heard of passkeys?
Yes, it's as stupid as it sounds. And works about as well.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicatio...
For example, their bug bounty program policy helpfully informs you that "screenshot detection avoidance" is not considered a vulnerability: https://hackerone.com/snapchat . That's because it's always possible.
Isn’t that what everyone is talking about?
Otherwise userDidTakeScreenshotNotification only fires for your own app
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicatio...
Ah... to imagine a world where you could just share a coordinate string and people could open it in whatever map app/page they wanted. Geo URI is probably the closest we have today but I don't think much of anything outside the OS Geo community accepts it.
A lat/lon/zoom/start?/dest? is kind of what a Google Maps share currently is, but it's neither an interoperable standard nor a reliable capture of the current state, so really the worst of both worlds.
(Also, hi AB! Nice to see you on here)
I believe it was their response to what3words. It's not as good at the "communicating by text" use case as what3words.
It's not clear who it is protecting against, it does not seem to be effective at protecting against anything at all, it is actively annoying to the user, and has no way to disable. Perfect example of the usual "security theater" feature.
I don't have an iOS device handy to compare against, but it surprises me that Apple wouldn't also recognize that Wi-Fi passwords in particular are extremely common things to share.
Unsecure: open Shortcuts, tap Gallery, search “Adjust Clipboard”. Add to Action Button folder and run from Action Button. - Or add “Dismiss Siri and Continue” action after “Get Clipboard” so you can say “Siri, Adjust Clipboard”.
Type in the still-unreasonably small window, tap Done, paste password. (Then clear clipboard I suppose and consider privacy implication if your clipboard syncs to Mac.)
And I prefer to see and choose the data an app stores on my fucking ICLOUD ACCOUNT. And fucking DELETE it when I want.
There's no way to do that from an iOS device.
Do you use the same password on every site? How do you deal with data breaches?
Android does it too: https://developer.android.com/about/versions/14/features/scr...
I dislike this hijacking for that reason and wish there was a way to turn it off.
If you screenshot what you are listening to, after the screenshot is taken spotify will open a full-screen popup to "share" the song you are listening to. This is quite dumb, especially since if you wanted to share a song via the screenshot, you can do so in the OS-level screenshot UI, and then you would close it and see Spotify's own similar version of the same UI. Spotify just really wants you to use their own share button so that they can track you.
I’m not sure why the app needs to be notified. There must be some use but I can’t think of it off the top of my head.
They want use to use the share button so your recipient is more likely to open Spotify (or whatever app) themselves.
So in this instance, am I right in understanding that iOS posts a notification after the user has completed a screenshot, which would make it impossible for the developer to use this notification to trigger anything that would modify that screenshot? Hence the developer’s work around?
Though I don’t see how this is anything like a keylogger.
And that is reasonable, but it is also a surface where an app touches the OS, which should be a permission boundary that I can control. Allowing the option to opt-out of screenshot blocking with a proper double-confirm warning and biometric auth is also reasonable.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicatio...
They’re abusing an iOS text rendering control function handled by the OS. Before the screenshot is taken iOS swapped out the rendered text for “sensitive” fields and images that.
The replacement is supposed to be something like a masked account number, password asterisks, or just general blur.
Not a marketing logo.
Yes, and I would say it's a bad thing that the OS tries to prevent this.
> seeing “follow” on every screenshotted post is just useless noise, but a small unobtrusive platform icon is a useful reminder that the post came from Bluesky and not another very visually similar service like X(cancel) or Mastodon.
I would say it's a bad thing that Bluesky makes the screenshot look different from what was on screen for the user. If I cared about excluding the "useless noise" from a faithful depiction of the pixels on my screen, I could address that myself.
I should be able to screenshot anything I want, including my password manager. I should be able to opt-out at the OS level, or any other level that enforces it. That's why it's definitely a user hostile feature.
> accidentally screenshotting your password manager;
I could not think of a more useless justification for installing malware into the OS. Okay, you've accidentally screenshotted your password manager. So what? Are you going to accidentally upload it to the internet too? I'd much rather live in a world where people who are that stupid face minor consequences for their actions than one in which all of our own computers are used against us.
It amuses me that browsers in incognito mode refuse to allow screenshots on mobile. But same browser running incognito on a desktop can be merrily screenshotted. What is the difference they are trying to enforce based purely on device form factor/OS.
My pet theory: it's because Snapchat got big early, platforms added the feature to facilitate Snapchat's business model, and then banks started abusing it, and it stuck around "because sekhurity".
...and it characteristic the level of patronising arrogance in the issue thread
"This is normal. It is not recommended to copy passwords to the clipboard in any case, this mitigates this behavior and complies with new Web Authentication standards."
This does not even invite a discussion. Maybe some people run tight, safe systems and know what they are doing? Maybe some people never rely on a single password being the only thing between them an an account compromise? Nope. Some patronising guy knows it all, and will override what people want to do on their machines.
As someone who develops apps for confidential conversations, making it harder for people to screenshot the confidential stuff is a feature the sending party wants, that is why they send in your app as opposed to others. It doesn’t make things impossible, just hard enough that 95% of people won’t bother to take a copy.
Same for example with disappearing audio messages on whatsapp
What I don’t like is the app being informed that I took a screenshot. The OS can hide things in screenshots without this.
In a world where people have multiple old phones lying around it isn't that hard to come up with this workaround.
If you send it, it is no longer yours to control.
If it is my phone, it should be mine to control. Too often it really isn't my phone...
Another way to look at it is the OS makes certain guarantees to the developer around security. Giving control of this to the user would erode that guarantee from the OS to the developer. The result of that is that some developers would simply never display some information (e.g. due to their own contracts or reasonable concerns about fraud/abuse/etc.).
Very similar to the video pipelines in modern devices. Prior to video pipelines which the OS could attest could not be hijacked by the user, many content providers simply would not allow e.g. Netflix to release their content on certain platforms. That the OS does provide such an attestation option for developers allows uses that otherwise would not exist.
[1]: https://www.alltrails.com/trail/canada/ontario/harrison-trai...
But this one looks like you actually mean it? Yikes.
> Do you use the same password on every site?
I use a password I can reconstruct in memory for sites I care about logging in by hand. If I don't, or don't mind resetting my password each time, I just use random garbage + whatever platform password manager is the one active today, with vague hopes that it'll still be there the next time I need to log in.
> How do you deal with data breaches?
Who ever cares about those? I'm yet to hear about anything impactful being released on those. It only matters if you actually do reuse the same e-mail/login and password combinations on both important sites and garbage sites. Which is something you should not. But 2FA and magic links tend to solve that vendor-side, these days.
A physical notebook is so easily lost I wouldn’t even consider it.
Frank Dux was a fraud! :)
Could write my own phone operating system to not be subject to the iOS WiFi password field display settings though!
Just search for keepass in the app store (Keepassium, KeePass Touch, Strongbox, ...)
(I use KeePassDX from F-droid it does not have network permissions)
