If it's between this and a perpetual logo, I'll take this any day.
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.
I actually hate that apps are allowed to blank out content on screenshots, and this can't be disabled. There are apps completely mis-using it, e.g. mobile payment apps which hardly show any sensitive data in most cases, but now I can't share e.g. infos on screen with someone else easily.
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.
> 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.
Software that intentionally subverts the intent of the user is malware. We now live in a world where most financial institutions literally ship malware as their primary or only interference to access their systems.
I understand the sentiment, but think about the non-technical user. Every time I use my mothers or any elderlies phone there are a lot of screenshots in the gallery, because they accidentally click the combo. How many people get scammed using screen sharing? It isn't that unreasonable to prevent this vector just to be more safe, especially if the bank might be partially at fault if a scam happens.
Hoping to not sound like a broken record, this is why having full ownership of your device and OS is important. My stock Pixel Android recently told me something along the line of "A security policy blocks screenshots for this app. Talk to your administrator if you want to change the policy". I looked in the mirror and my administrator said "time for a policy change, we're moving to GrapheneOS".
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.
“Security” that makes ordinary sharing unusable is often just UX debt wearing a security badge. The right fix is selective redaction, not disabling screenshots everywhere.
I went to screenshot my upcoming Verizon Fios fiber install out of excitement and got an immediate warning dialog.
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.
Consider the possibility that many HN users, who likely also constantly ask why mice are needed when vim/Emacs exist, are not the users who mostly use regular apps.
Uh, no? I highly doubt that a non-occluding watermark on screenshots is even in the top 100 gripes most people have with X. And I don't use either platform. If anything your argument is an accusation of bias without any discussion of merits.
This is phone OS developer's fault for even allowing it. When I take a screenshot, I expect to have an image of exactly whatever was displayed on the screen at the time. Its not a picture of your app, its a picture of my screen. Some banking apps used to (or still) prevent this and now some apps get a hook to insert their branding. My device serves some master other than myself.
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.
I don't have an issue with BSky's use, but I regularly run into the functionality's abuse elsewhere, such as multiple of the biggest Thai banks' apps where every screen in the app entirely blocks screenshots (iOS). Doing a P2P money transfer and want to send a screenshot to the recipient for them to confirm their info before you hit submit on a non-reversible transfer? Blocked. Want to screenshot a promotion's terms for proof or a personal reminder? Blocked. It's even worse as multiple of the biggest brick-and-mortar Thai banks wholly dropped web access and are now smartphone-only. (Or more obscure, want to translate a single-language screen into another language? Blocked.) Etc.
I want to take a screen shot of the transaction I just did. Can't because some ahole decided for me that it's too sensitive information and blacks out the whole screen. this API is stupid without control in settings of the os
>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.
OTOH, I might very well want to take a screenshot of my own bank details, transactions, or other sensitive information. It's annoying that my information is being protected from myself.
Then it's a bad solution to a real problem. A better solution would be exposing a hook that apps can call when a screenshot is initiated that tells the OS to warn the user before saving the screenshot. This way the user is actually educated on the risk while still respecting their right to control the outcome.
The OS could draw an ugly censoring block over the sensitive information. That would protect the user's privacy when needed but also prevent apps mis-using the feature like this.
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.
I don't think they're abusing functionality at all. I don't think screenshotting a skeet should, by default, leak the follow state of the user taking the screenshot, which is what would happen without the secure input swap
"Secure inputs" take many forms, and it doesn't feel like this is abuse in any meaningful way
If a dev forgot to obfuscate the password and rendered it as plain text on the screen, then what are the chances they remember to program the blur into this screenshot api hook. Or why not add an alert, “what me to blur sensitive info? Yes/No”
The app doesn't know. It just produces a widget tree, and the OS-provided renderer renders it this way or that way. In particular, it chooses not to render controls marked as "security-sensitive" when the rendering is intended for a screenshot; it could instead put empty boxes in their place, etc. The app has no idea and no control, AFAIK.
I wonder if this is the expectation of the majority or just the expectation of us tech people.
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.
Bank apps black out the whole screen when I take a screenshot and it’s super annoying. As a user, I should be able to take a screenshot of my screen. I can use a camera or another phone to do it anyway.
Reddit has a toggle in its settings to disable it. X, too, I think.
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.
> 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.
The thing that really irritates me about the banking apps blocking screenshots is that it's pretty clear to me it's not about protecting customers but denying customers the ability to document something related to their account.
No, it's about saving the bank money - and what costs them a lot of money is the average person being fooled into sending people their account information easily.
> I expect to have an image of exactly whatever was displayed on the screen at the time
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.
The effects of cramming 2 separate workflows and 5 features into one thing called "screenshot" because anything else would end up with something too complicated for users to understand the interaction (sarcasm that figuring out what the behavior is locked to in these scenarios is just as confusing).
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!
This is in fact a watermark to promote the application, which otherwise wouldn't be recognizable since Bluesky looks like every other microblogging app. I didn't know that Sam literally named the file GrowthHack.tsx, which is pretty funny.
Well, I have not once found a single case where an app reacting to screenshots and controlling the process in any way was anything to me but hostile and annoying. This one does not help.
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.
It is actually astonishing to me that this is not something which can be turned off at the OS level, or as a permission setting in the app permissions.
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.
> The app knowing I took a screenshot feels adjacent to me to a keylogger.
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.
> The app knowing I took a screenshot feels adjacent to me to a keylogger.
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.
but you didn't read the part where the mechanism is explained? it doesn't do anything like capturing information. it just marks a button "sensitive" causing it to be hidden in a screenshot, thus revealing an icon that was put there underneath the button.
Did you read the article? Bluesky doesn't know you're taking a screenshot, iOS just hides the follow button in the screenshot (consequently making the Bluesky logo visible).
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.
I would happily use the Google Maps "share" feature, but I've yet to encounter any but the simplest of scenarios where it actually preserves the entire context of what I'm trying to share: the viewport, the start and destination, stops along the way, route choice, the time of day, all of it.
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.
Good thing if you have GMaps open to the directions list while driving and tell Siri to take a screenshot, it doesn’t throw up a full page of nonsense over your directions that only Voice Control (not Siri alone) or a [potentially nonexistent] passenger could close.
> 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.
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.
Did you read the post? Nothing is hijacked, but its a trick where they render the normal button in a ui element for secret data, which is blanked by the system on screenshot, revealing the logo underneath. Its a reasonable feature, so its hard for apple to control it better or remove this.
When I take a screenshot in ChatGPT, it shows a "share this chat?" toast at the top.
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.
Yup, that's by design. They want to force you to "share" so they can both track who you interact with, and also try to convert the other person into a paying customer.
There should be a layer of user control where the user can make the OS lie to the app. The app has no need to know when a screenshot or recording is happening, what the real location is, what file system contents are, etc.
Side note- The Screenshot culture itself needs to die, sorry. Many a time, a share button simply works. I don’t know why people would share a screenshot or a map instead of pin and share their location. Yes there are cases where a screenshot helps but majority cases simply is “come to this place” a which turns out to make more difficult because people apparently don’t know how to share locations with pin and share!
Screenshots are much better for archival. So many times you go back to a url/link you shared, and poof it's gone or the content has changed from when you sent it.
Screenshots allows you to get a point in time reference to what you are sharing.
In the case of sharing a link I have to remember/find where it is in each app, likely scroll through a long list of messaging (and for some reason non-messaging apps) to find the correct app, select the contact, and then pray that the link sent actually works for them and contains the correct information I'm seeing (very often the link will actually direct them to a web version of the app I'm using, then put a modal popup in front of the information asking them to use the app, then either send them to the app store, or send them to the app but strip out the actual information I linked and send them to a blank map).
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.
The ideal "World Wide Web" envisioned by it's original design, was that a URI was a durable pointer to an immutable piece of information.
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.
I totally disagree - the few times I accidentally use a share button, or are forced to use one, the experience is so desperately miserable I am forcibly reminded why I never use them. It's always several clicks, choosing the social platform I need from the millions-long-list which is paginated into pages of like 4 icons at a time (I just want a URL! but you broke your website to force users into the app!) and from there choosing a specific chat or group or whatever from a poorly ordered list that starts with some person I met at a bar twelve years ago rather than the chat I was literally just typing in two seconds ago...
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
I also despise this "screenshot blocking" stuff. A device listens is supposed to me, not to the apps. I want a screenshot to be a copy of the raw pixels, and an app should not know about it or have a right to know about it.
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
This is what made me avoid chrome since release, I tried to right click a youtube channel background as a teen wanting to use it as a template to make my own channel background on photoshop... turns out they had disabled it, while I could on firefox.
Nobody in the comments talking about snapchat where like one of the core pillars of what "sets their service apart" is the difficulty of taking a screenshot without notifying the other party
Wasn’t that the entire premise of the product when it launched? Disappearing messages and minimal footprint so you could be confident your communications were semi-private?
That was the expectation of using the product so it fits and isn’t anything like this discussion.
Yes. And because of the platforms deciding to enable that business model, we're now in a bullshit reality where the very apps that need to be screenshotted most often, are first to abuse platform features and prevent screenshots from being taken.
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".
Not only 'pocket computers' are an issue.
I was thoroughly shocked when I found out that websites can detect that the dev-tools are open. That is something that a website should never be able to know, yet here we are.
They don't respond to it. It simply says "this button is part of sensitive content", and the OS itself hides the sensitive content, revealing the image below it
have you never encountered the plague of apps saying "don't screenshot, our content looks so much better when you share it, see:" and then displaying a picture of the stupidest looking thing youve ever seen in your life as though you would ever consider showing that to your friends instead of the most personal thing - literally showing them what youre seeing with your own eyes
On iOS, if you swipe control center down and then back up but don’t lift your finger, the screenshot will not have the logo. I do this with Twitter so my screenshots don’t have the X logo.
Interesting that this works. I know I have been frustrated recently when trying to take a screenshot of a bank transfer or something similar, but I couldn't find which app that was to test again. I tested on the iOS Passwords app, and I couldn't get the trick to work in that. I wonder if I'm doing something wrong, or it only works in specific apps.
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.
They shouldn't even disallow screenshots from a security measure. If the user wants to take a screenshot of their bank account info or a password manager they should. Maybe an additional permission for screenshare. No device has protection against a second device taking a recording so it's really just security theater
It's all "security" and all until your banking app has a bug that breaks exporting bank statements and the only way to get it out is to take screenshots - which are blocked as well. Oh, and you need to submit it by today.
At least on rooted Android devices you can bypass that.
I'm confused why people are mad at Bluesky for this. Everyone stating their issues seems more related to Apple than Bluesky. So why point the finger at them?
I don’t think a significant percent of real Bluesky users actually care.
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.
First - it's great that people can't take screenshots of their sensitive data by accident
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.
I know of social media sites who have kept an untracked version of the link in the dom of the A tag, but replace it with their in-house link tracker copy of it as you're clicking, that way the destination looks correct when you hover over the link.
A simple call to get a list of sensitive screen areas would suffice. Add a bunch of options to make everybody happy, but don't allow replacement with different content.
This is an interesting case of "Good use" of a "bad feature". This feature is bad because it works against the user and device owner, but this use case like hiding your password when sharing your screen is a good use case.
It feels restrictive, especially since it’s part of a broader pattern of limiting user freedom on platforms. For instance, on PC you can't simply right click on a video and save it on bluesky. They add some frontend bullshit to prevent you from doing that. On "new" Reddit I remember when you saved an image it would always have a watermark on it. On PC, you can't preview the raw image/video either. On Instagram you can't save images at all easily. Cant view content without being logged in, etc.. Now contrast this with platforms like Mastodon where I can do whatever I want with the uploaded media there and there are barely any such restrictions.
Dear app developers: please do not detect screenshots, and do not change behavior. It is my phone and I should have the right to save anything on my screen for my own purposes and you should not know that I do that.
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.)
Unfortunately way more applications inject some sort of info into the image using noise of alpha channels when you take a screenshot...
Ofc you shouldn't be doing anything wrong, but let's say you join a court and provide some evidence in confidence, you can be found if that evidence is shared with both lawyers
If the feature can sometimes be useful (including this situation, which some other comments mentioned; but also for other things such as hiding actual secure data), then perhaps it should be made as a setting which can be changed in the setting menu (e.g. "Exclude secure data from screenshots"; it should also mention which apps use this feature), so prevent abuse. (This would also make it clear what the feature is, as well as being able to disable it.)
LinkedIn’s job screen in the app is a good example of this different presentation.
I’ve noticed a certain AI recruitment company gets “highlighted” (darkened white background of the screen, but their logo is pure white and REALLY stands out), but when I screenshot it, it reverts to normal, like there’s no blatant special advertising.
Different underlying mechanism. The LinkedIn one (and almost all ads on Instagram/Facebook these days) use a gain map to increase the brightness of the image. Here's a site demoing the tasteful application of this [0], you can see the difference viewing it live versus taking a screenshot of the result.
Why would someone use Bluesky? Isn't that a cesspool of the same midwit scolds, purity spirals, and performative outrage that made Twitter unbearable before the great migration?
No because per default the input is not cleared when screenshotting. If you‘d implement this yourself for security reasons you'd most likely blur / overlay the whole screen when the app enters background state.
Probably, but to the extent that was at all a problem to begin with, multiply it by another 0.0001 or whatever for the threat of the screenshot being taken mid switch away!
If not for the function being named "GrowthHack" I would have thought that hiding following status for screenshots to be a good privacy measure. They don't use it to hide anything else and since I'm not a user of the app I don't know if there is more extraneous information that could be used to infer or track down who screenshotted and they don't hide.
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
This sort of stuff to me is an example of fear within an organization. Whenever I see engineering resources allocated towards self promotion and branding rather than quality and features for its users it shows how leaders want control over narratives.
It's probably silly to make OP's judgement of any of these implementations in isolation, but you can sense a real fear about the growth (or lack thereof) inside Bluesky. Fiddling with the presented metrics (likes count getting moved ahead of reposts), promoting total user signups while being silent on collapsing DAUs. They are promising a lot at once with AI custom feeds from Attie and subreddit-style communities that smells like feature creep.
Marketing, like every other functional part of a business, requires technology and engineers. This has nothing to do with fear, you just don’t respect non-engineering work as critical to running a business.
Someone spending half a day on a feature that places the app's logo in the screenshot so people seeing it can know where it came from is "fear within an organization"? You've got to be kidding lol
Does anyone know a way to do this for a computer? I built a p2ppoker website the protects the shuffle from the server but I would like to blank the cards on screenshots to prevent huds and AIs from making the game unplayable.
Companies always want to slop-spam their logos onto everything. It is a very annoying habit. On youtube videos this is even more annoying; several use floating logos.
The best way to ask for this is to send an email, to the email address which you can find at the bottom of the page (click on "Contact"). There's no guarantee that the mods will find your comment otherwise.
Saying @dang has no effect; it does not activate a batsignal or any other mechanism of mod summoning. The only way to be sure a mod see this is to email them; see the contact link in the footer and include a link to the comment.
Tangentially, I see a lot of people here upset that apps can react to your screenshot before it is captured. I think it is helpful to think about it as a tradeoff between freedoms:
(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!
If it's between this and a perpetual logo, I'll take this any day.
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.
I actually hate that apps are allowed to blank out content on screenshots, and this can't be disabled. There are apps completely mis-using it, e.g. mobile payment apps which hardly show any sensitive data in most cases, but now I can't share e.g. infos on screen with someone else easily.
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.
> 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.
5 replies →
Software that intentionally subverts the intent of the user is malware. We now live in a world where most financial institutions literally ship malware as their primary or only interference to access their systems.
I understand the sentiment, but think about the non-technical user. Every time I use my mothers or any elderlies phone there are a lot of screenshots in the gallery, because they accidentally click the combo. How many people get scammed using screen sharing? It isn't that unreasonable to prevent this vector just to be more safe, especially if the bank might be partially at fault if a scam happens.
4 replies →
Hoping to not sound like a broken record, this is why having full ownership of your device and OS is important. My stock Pixel Android recently told me something along the line of "A security policy blocks screenshots for this app. Talk to your administrator if you want to change the policy". I looked in the mirror and my administrator said "time for a policy change, we're moving to GrapheneOS".
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.
“Security” that makes ordinary sharing unusable is often just UX debt wearing a security badge. The right fix is selective redaction, not disabling screenshots everywhere.
1 reply →
I went to screenshot my upcoming Verizon Fios fiber install out of excitement and got an immediate warning dialog.
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.
[dead]
It is strange how this spawned a 100+ comments discussion on HN.
It's not about the logo. It's about abusing a platform feature that arguably shouldn't exist in the first place.
[flagged]
Consider the possibility that many HN users, who likely also constantly ask why mice are needed when vim/Emacs exist, are not the users who mostly use regular apps.
Uh, no? I highly doubt that a non-occluding watermark on screenshots is even in the top 100 gripes most people have with X. And I don't use either platform. If anything your argument is an accusation of bias without any discussion of merits.
8 replies →
This is phone OS developer's fault for even allowing it. When I take a screenshot, I expect to have an image of exactly whatever was displayed on the screen at the time. Its not a picture of your app, its a picture of my screen. Some banking apps used to (or still) prevent this and now some apps get a hook to insert their branding. My device serves some master other than myself.
This exists for a very good 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. 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.
I don't have an issue with BSky's use, but I regularly run into the functionality's abuse elsewhere, such as multiple of the biggest Thai banks' apps where every screen in the app entirely blocks screenshots (iOS). Doing a P2P money transfer and want to send a screenshot to the recipient for them to confirm their info before you hit submit on a non-reversible transfer? Blocked. Want to screenshot a promotion's terms for proof or a personal reminder? Blocked. It's even worse as multiple of the biggest brick-and-mortar Thai banks wholly dropped web access and are now smartphone-only. (Or more obscure, want to translate a single-language screen into another language? Blocked.) Etc.
3 replies →
I want to take a screen shot of the transaction I just did. Can't because some ahole decided for me that it's too sensitive information and blacks out the whole screen. this API is stupid without control in settings of the os
11 replies →
>This exists for a very good reason.
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.
OTOH, I might very well want to take a screenshot of my own bank details, transactions, or other sensitive information. It's annoying that my information is being protected from myself.
2 replies →
Then it's a bad solution to a real problem. A better solution would be exposing a hook that apps can call when a screenshot is initiated that tells the OS to warn the user before saving the screenshot. This way the user is actually educated on the risk while still respecting their right to control the outcome.
The OS could draw an ugly censoring block over the sensitive information. That would protect the user's privacy when needed but also prevent apps mis-using the feature like this.
3 replies →
It's MY phone that I paid over $1000 for. Let me choose what is exposed and what is not.
1 reply →
> it doesn’t accidentally end up in a screenshot
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.
I don't think they're abusing functionality at all. I don't think screenshotting a skeet should, by default, leak the follow state of the user taking the screenshot, which is what would happen without the secure input swap
"Secure inputs" take many forms, and it doesn't feel like this is abuse in any meaningful way
1 reply →
"accidentally end up in a screenshot" --- how often do you even take a screenshot on a phone, much less accidentally?
5 replies →
Account numbers appear on checks. They are not exactly secret, and if I want to take a screenshot of one, I should be able to.
But how can I take a screenshot that intentionally shows the password or whatever?
2 replies →
If it's to prevent accidents, it should just prompt user to confirm saving the screenshot with sensitive information.
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.
4 replies →
If a dev forgot to obfuscate the password and rendered it as plain text on the screen, then what are the chances they remember to program the blur into this screenshot api hook. Or why not add an alert, “what me to blur sensitive info? Yes/No”
1 reply →
I can always just pull out my second phone to bypass all this shit.
Which is why everyone should root the their phone to turn this kind of shit off.
[dead]
1000%. Apps should not even be able to know that I've taken a screenshot - let alone change the contents of it.
The app doesn't know. It just produces a widget tree, and the OS-provided renderer renders it this way or that way. In particular, it chooses not to render controls marked as "security-sensitive" when the rendering is intended for a screenshot; it could instead put empty boxes in their place, etc. The app has no idea and no control, AFAIK.
8 replies →
I wonder if this is the expectation of the majority or just the expectation of us tech people.
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.
Bank apps black out the whole screen when I take a screenshot and it’s super annoying. As a user, I should be able to take a screenshot of my screen. I can use a camera or another phone to do it anyway.
iOS allows something similar. twitter (X) will also add a logo. I believe reddit did the same but i stopped using their app a while ago.
Reddit has a toggle in its settings to disable it. X, too, I think.
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.
1 reply →
iOS allows something similar because this is iOS. iOS allows something exactly the same because this article is about iOS.
Bluesky trick exposes how strange the abstraction is
So...
> 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.
The thing that really irritates me about the banking apps blocking screenshots is that it's pretty clear to me it's not about protecting customers but denying customers the ability to document something related to their account.
No, it's about saving the bank money - and what costs them a lot of money is the average person being fooled into sending people their account information easily.
1 reply →
if only there was some kind of app review process... but Apple doesn't care.
I guess the Bluesky bros got inspired by Threads, again.
> I expect to have an image of exactly whatever was displayed on the screen at the time
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.
I want those things included, at least by default. A screenshot normally captures the user’s screen size, brightness, zoom level, font choices, etc.
It is often important to people that the screenshot is an accurate record of what was on the screen.
2 replies →
The effects of cramming 2 separate workflows and 5 features into one thing called "screenshot" because anything else would end up with something too complicated for users to understand the interaction (sarcasm that figuring out what the behavior is locked to in these scenarios is just as confusing).
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!
1 reply →
Can they do something similar so that caps include the full date/time? I hate when caps are perpetually “1 hour ago”.
This is in fact a watermark to promote the application, which otherwise wouldn't be recognizable since Bluesky looks like every other microblogging app. I didn't know that Sam literally named the file GrowthHack.tsx, which is pretty funny.
> which otherwise wouldn't be recognizable since Bluesky looks like every other microblogging app.
The text at the top of the screenshot is
> Eric Roston
> @eroston.bsky.social
So it's pretty easy to tell IMHO.
what happens when it’s a custom handle like @example.com?
1 reply →
I can't help but respect the dev's self-awareness
I mean, X does the exact same thing
Well, I have not once found a single case where an app reacting to screenshots and controlling the process in any way was anything to me but hostile and annoying. This one does not help.
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.
It is actually astonishing to me that this is not something which can be turned off at the OS level, or as a permission setting in the app permissions.
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.
> The app knowing I took a screenshot feels adjacent to me to a keylogger.
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.
34 replies →
> The app knowing I took a screenshot feels adjacent to me to a keylogger.
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.
6 replies →
but you didn't read the part where the mechanism is explained? it doesn't do anything like capturing information. it just marks a button "sensitive" causing it to be hidden in a screenshot, thus revealing an icon that was put there underneath the button.
Did you read the article? Bluesky doesn't know you're taking a screenshot, iOS just hides the follow button in the screenshot (consequently making the Bluesky logo visible).
3 replies →
> hostile and annoying
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.
I would happily use the Google Maps "share" feature, but I've yet to encounter any but the simplest of scenarios where it actually preserves the entire context of what I'm trying to share: the viewport, the start and destination, stops along the way, route choice, the time of day, all of it.
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.
8 replies →
It's not about what you want. It's about increasing engagement with the Google platform
Today I noticed that Amazon Pharmacy decided to blank out my prescription info that I was screenshotting to send to my doctor. WTF.
12 replies →
Blame Apple for even allowing apps to be aware of the user taking a screenshot.
Just like their iCloud Keychain API that lets apps secretly track users across app reinstalls and device resets.
18 replies →
How else are they gonna track you? Think of the big tech
Good thing if you have GMaps open to the directions list while driving and tell Siri to take a screenshot, it doesn’t throw up a full page of nonsense over your directions that only Voice Control (not Siri alone) or a [potentially nonexistent] passenger could close.
Oh wait it absolutely does.
It still baffles me that it has become normal for an OS to place the wishes of an app above those of the user.
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.
> 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.
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.
Did you read the post? Nothing is hijacked, but its a trick where they render the normal button in a ui element for secret data, which is blanked by the system on screenshot, revealing the logo underneath. Its a reasonable feature, so its hard for apple to control it better or remove this.
5 replies →
When I take a screenshot in ChatGPT, it shows a "share this chat?" toast at the top.
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.
Yup, that's by design. They want to force you to "share" so they can both track who you interact with, and also try to convert the other person into a paying customer.
There should be a layer of user control where the user can make the OS lie to the app. The app has no need to know when a screenshot or recording is happening, what the real location is, what file system contents are, etc.
Side note- The Screenshot culture itself needs to die, sorry. Many a time, a share button simply works. I don’t know why people would share a screenshot or a map instead of pin and share their location. Yes there are cases where a screenshot helps but majority cases simply is “come to this place” a which turns out to make more difficult because people apparently don’t know how to share locations with pin and share!
> Many a time, a share button simply works
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 are much better for archival. So many times you go back to a url/link you shared, and poof it's gone or the content has changed from when you sent it.
Screenshots allows you to get a point in time reference to what you are sharing.
In the case of sharing a link I have to remember/find where it is in each app, likely scroll through a long list of messaging (and for some reason non-messaging apps) to find the correct app, select the contact, and then pray that the link sent actually works for them and contains the correct information I'm seeing (very often the link will actually direct them to a web version of the app I'm using, then put a modal popup in front of the information asking them to use the app, then either send them to the app store, or send them to the app but strip out the actual information I linked and send them to a blank map).
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.
The ideal "World Wide Web" envisioned by it's original design, was that a URI was a durable pointer to an immutable piece of information.
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.
I totally disagree - the few times I accidentally use a share button, or are forced to use one, the experience is so desperately miserable I am forcibly reminded why I never use them. It's always several clicks, choosing the social platform I need from the millions-long-list which is paginated into pages of like 4 icons at a time (I just want a URL! but you broke your website to force users into the app!) and from there choosing a specific chat or group or whatever from a poorly ordered list that starts with some person I met at a bar twelve years ago rather than the chat I was literally just typing in two seconds ago...
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
I also despise this "screenshot blocking" stuff. A device listens is supposed to me, not to the apps. I want a screenshot to be a copy of the raw pixels, and an app should not know about it or have a right to know about it.
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
GrapheneOS doesn't allow for it. You'd need a rooted device to bypass screenshot blocking
2 replies →
This is what made me avoid chrome since release, I tried to right click a youtube channel background as a teen wanting to use it as a template to make my own channel background on photoshop... turns out they had disabled it, while I could on firefox.
> I wish, and wish only I can, that this trend goes away at some point.
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.
For Bluesky, sure. I think the comment was aimed at the trend.
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.
3 replies →
agree with you.
I hate the ChatGPT app and Spotify the most for their screenshot behavior.
Nobody in the comments talking about snapchat where like one of the core pillars of what "sets their service apart" is the difficulty of taking a screenshot without notifying the other party
Wasn’t that the entire premise of the product when it launched? Disappearing messages and minimal footprint so you could be confident your communications were semi-private?
That was the expectation of using the product so it fits and isn’t anything like this discussion.
Yes. And because of the platforms deciding to enable that business model, we're now in a bullshit reality where the very apps that need to be screenshotted most often, are first to abuse platform features and prevent screenshots from being taken.
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".
1 reply →
That plus product design.
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
1 reply →
This is why pocket computers are still so unserious. My programs should not be aware let alone respond to my administrative actions like screenshots.
Not only 'pocket computers' are an issue. I was thoroughly shocked when I found out that websites can detect that the dev-tools are open. That is something that a website should never be able to know, yet here we are.
They don't respond to it. It simply says "this button is part of sensitive content", and the OS itself hides the sensitive content, revealing the image below it
have you never encountered the plague of apps saying "don't screenshot, our content looks so much better when you share it, see:" and then displaying a picture of the stupidest looking thing youve ever seen in your life as though you would ever consider showing that to your friends instead of the most personal thing - literally showing them what youre seeing with your own eyes
1 reply →
[dead]
On iOS, if you swipe control center down and then back up but don’t lift your finger, the screenshot will not have the logo. I do this with Twitter so my screenshots don’t have the X logo.
Interesting that this works. I know I have been frustrated recently when trying to take a screenshot of a bank transfer or something similar, but I couldn't find which app that was to test again. I tested on the iOS Passwords app, and I couldn't get the trick to work in that. I wonder if I'm doing something wrong, or it only works in specific apps.
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.
X and Threads do this too. I wish they all wouldn't, messing with screenshots should only ever be done when preventing them as a security measure.
They shouldn't even disallow screenshots from a security measure. If the user wants to take a screenshot of their bank account info or a password manager they should. Maybe an additional permission for screenshare. No device has protection against a second device taking a recording so it's really just security theater
It's all "security" and all until your banking app has a bug that breaks exporting bank statements and the only way to get it out is to take screenshots - which are blocked as well. Oh, and you need to submit it by today.
At least on rooted Android devices you can bypass that.
Even preventing them shouldn't be possible. It's just security theater anyway. You can easily capture it with another camera.
Until the big players agree on a watermark that their cameras will refuse to photograph.
Reddit as well. Although they let you disable it from what I remember.
I'm confused why people are mad at Bluesky for this. Everyone stating their issues seems more related to Apple than Bluesky. So why point the finger at them?
I don’t think a significant percent of real Bluesky users actually care.
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.
> a significant percent of Bluesky users
42 of their 56 active users might not care about a watermark but god dammit do they respect it
And so should you
Bluesky didn't have to use this API for this purpose.
Okay? Is the purpose bad? Leading to bad things? What's the problem
[flagged]
First - it's great that people can't take screenshots of their sensitive data by accident
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.
I know of social media sites who have kept an untracked version of the link in the dom of the A tag, but replace it with their in-house link tracker copy of it as you're clicking, that way the destination looks correct when you hover over the link.
A simple call to get a list of sensitive screen areas would suffice. Add a bunch of options to make everybody happy, but don't allow replacement with different content.
[dead]
This is an interesting case of "Good use" of a "bad feature". This feature is bad because it works against the user and device owner, but this use case like hiding your password when sharing your screen is a good use case.
This is a pretty cool, harmless hack honestly. I don’t see how you could be mad at it.
It feels restrictive, especially since it’s part of a broader pattern of limiting user freedom on platforms. For instance, on PC you can't simply right click on a video and save it on bluesky. They add some frontend bullshit to prevent you from doing that. On "new" Reddit I remember when you saved an image it would always have a watermark on it. On PC, you can't preview the raw image/video either. On Instagram you can't save images at all easily. Cant view content without being logged in, etc.. Now contrast this with platforms like Mastodon where I can do whatever I want with the uploaded media there and there are barely any such restrictions.
To be fair this is useful for discovering bluesky from screenshots getting posted on other platforms.
Their product UI kind of looks like X, so it's helpful to know the source of a post
I don't think anyone doubts that it benefits the company.
If only there was some uniform way to identify a resource. But it might lead people out of the walled garden so best not to risk it.
Or, in the case of X, into the outside of the wall of the garden with no way through
Dear app developers: please do not detect screenshots, and do not change behavior. It is my phone and I should have the right to save anything on my screen for my own purposes and you should not know that I do that.
This complaint should be aimed at operating system developers who should have never allow such infringement to begin with.
Reading between the lines:
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.)
Unfortunately way more applications inject some sort of info into the image using noise of alpha channels when you take a screenshot... Ofc you shouldn't be doing anything wrong, but let's say you join a court and provide some evidence in confidence, you can be found if that evidence is shared with both lawyers
If the feature can sometimes be useful (including this situation, which some other comments mentioned; but also for other things such as hiding actual secure data), then perhaps it should be made as a setting which can be changed in the setting menu (e.g. "Exclude secure data from screenshots"; it should also mention which apps use this feature), so prevent abuse. (This would also make it clear what the feature is, as well as being able to disable it.)
That such a setting does not exist suggests the feature's true purpose is not for the end user's own benefit!
Once apps can present one thing to the user and another thing to the captured image, there are some pretty weird possibilities
LinkedIn’s job screen in the app is a good example of this different presentation.
I’ve noticed a certain AI recruitment company gets “highlighted” (darkened white background of the screen, but their logo is pure white and REALLY stands out), but when I screenshot it, it reverts to normal, like there’s no blatant special advertising.
Different underlying mechanism. The LinkedIn one (and almost all ads on Instagram/Facebook these days) use a gain map to increase the brightness of the image. Here's a site demoing the tasteful application of this [0], you can see the difference viewing it live versus taking a screenshot of the result.
[0]: https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr-gain-map-gallery/
1 reply →
Like adding some nice fingerprinting. I really feel my devices work against me. Nothing works for me.
I appreciate the Game Changer reference
I only ever used bluesky/twitter via web app on my phone, and stuff like this affirms that it's the right decision.
Why would someone use Bluesky? Isn't that a cesspool of the same midwit scolds, purity spirals, and performative outrage that made Twitter unbearable before the great migration?
I use bluesky for cross posting my blogs
> The “Follow” button is visible when I take the screenshot mid-switch.
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?
No because per default the input is not cleared when screenshotting. If you‘d implement this yourself for security reasons you'd most likely blur / overlay the whole screen when the app enters background state.
Probably, but to the extent that was at all a problem to begin with, multiply it by another 0.0001 or whatever for the threat of the screenshot being taken mid switch away!
If not for the function being named "GrowthHack" I would have thought that hiding following status for screenshots to be a good privacy measure. They don't use it to hide anything else and since I'm not a user of the app I don't know if there is more extraneous information that could be used to infer or track down who screenshotted and they don't hide.
Is this the relevant issue for Graphene OS?
https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/664
Upvote the issue if so.
This technique would be devious if applied to a QR code.
They're just following Apple's lead.
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
There was at least a fig leaf of “I’m typing on a mobile keyboard” excuse my typos”.
That’s just an email signature, configurable (or removable, if you prefer) by the user. This is completely different, in my opinion.
Perplexity does this on web by adding a logo in response to key combos for normal screenshot shortcuts.
This is why I use the browser version for anything. I’m using an actual user agent.
I was wondering about this as well; did they only test with the official iOS app? Or also through a mobile webbrowser?
This sort of stuff to me is an example of fear within an organization. Whenever I see engineering resources allocated towards self promotion and branding rather than quality and features for its users it shows how leaders want control over narratives.
It's equally possible there was one engineer with some free time who thought it would be cool.
This is correct. I was tired of Bluesky screenshots looking bland, no culture of fear needed
Implementing a watermark isn't a thing anyone thinks is a cool feature they want to try out.
3 replies →
It's probably silly to make OP's judgement of any of these implementations in isolation, but you can sense a real fear about the growth (or lack thereof) inside Bluesky. Fiddling with the presented metrics (likes count getting moved ahead of reposts), promoting total user signups while being silent on collapsing DAUs. They are promising a lot at once with AI custom feeds from Attie and subreddit-style communities that smells like feature creep.
3 replies →
Adding a watermark, how radical, dude
And such engineer would have enough organizational clout to just ship it without going through anyone?
9 replies →
Marketing, like every other functional part of a business, requires technology and engineers. This has nothing to do with fear, you just don’t respect non-engineering work as critical to running a business.
Someone spending half a day on a feature that places the app's logo in the screenshot so people seeing it can know where it came from is "fear within an organization"? You've got to be kidding lol
X does the same thing.
Just since Nikita joined (altho now he's gone, doubt they will remove it tho)
Does anyone know a way to do this for a computer? I built a p2ppoker website the protects the shuffle from the server but I would like to blank the cards on screenshots to prevent huds and AIs from making the game unplayable.
I’m interested in reading more about this. how does p2ppoker work out?
This trick was almost certainly invented by Nikita Bier when he joined X.
I’ve noticed that if you screenshot a thread in the threads app an “@threads” logo appears in the upper right corner
Tiktok has been watermarking videos since the beginning.
Usually post http://aidr.wtf appropriately.
> Thankfully, I remembered that Bluesky app is open source (or at least the code is available to look at).
What does the author mean by this? I checked the repo and the project seems to be MIT licensed, which makes it open source.
Is this iPhone only? I've never seen this on Android.
It's iOS only, relying on iOS to exclude isSecureTextEntry things from screenshots:
https://github.com/mozzius/expo-privacy-sensitive/blob/main/...
I think RevenueCat does the same thing. Smart way to exploit network effects!
has this guy lived on a rock? reddit/twitter/etc every social media platform does this already.
the difference is those apps aren’t open source so you can’t go explore how they work
It's pretty likely that bluesky users aren't on other social media. Because it pretends to be better than them (this shows it isn't really, though)
I know you don't think it's bluesky, but which app do you think is better at putting its logo on screenshots?
1 reply →
[flagged]
Example n+1 of why I only use web and not download an app
♫
Singin H-I-T-L-E-R drive around town in a fancy car
Singin H-I-T-L-E-R drive around town in a fancy car
♫
Companies always want to slop-spam their logos onto everything. It is a very annoying habit. On youtube videos this is even more annoying; several use floating logos.
As Spring inevitably leads to Winter, and Night follows Day, Thus the Inevitable Enshittification of all Centralized Platforms
[dead]
[flagged]
[dead]
This is arguably missing the "how" from the title -- can someone fix?
The best way to ask for this is to send an email, to the email address which you can find at the bottom of the page (click on "Contact"). There's no guarantee that the mods will find your comment otherwise.
@Dang: I would like to report an innocent victim to the automatic "How"-Removal.
Saying @dang has no effect; it does not activate a batsignal or any other mechanism of mod summoning. The only way to be sure a mod see this is to email them; see the contact link in the footer and include a link to the comment.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
We really need better haters
Really, can’t find any on a network as vast and populated as Bluesky??
Where anyone can say anything?
Maybe it’s so decentralized there is a dark web within BlueSky now! DarkSky
3 replies →
Shill News
Tangentially, I see a lot of people here upset that apps can react to your screenshot before it is captured. I think it is helpful to think about it as a tradeoff between freedoms:
(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!
B is an illusion, and it seems like about 90% of the time it's used for dumb or bad purposes even if it did work.
Locks can be picked. We still make and use locks.
5 replies →