Comment by TeMPOraL
8 hours ago
> 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".
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[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.
> before pausing and realizing that this would only cause even more problems with those apps,
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).
On a similar note in terms of frustration, my bank ended up getting me to memorize my randomly-generated passwords twice because it blocked pasting. I guess it's to discourage writing them down in plaintext files, but I bet it just makes most people choose meaningful (and therefore weak and guessable) passwords.
> much sekhurity
This feeling usually hits me at airports, with my shoes off and water confiscated. The terrorists won.
So did the airport and companies selling you overpriced water beyond the security screening.
Then they deserve you taking a photo with a second phone
Well, I did, after the fact, but it's only because I had a work phone on me (that doesn't yet actively block sharing to non-work devices).
I doubt most people have a second phone on hand, ready and able to capture actual screen shots when your phone is preventing screenhots.
There might be a market for a USB-C camera to take phone screen photos to immediately upload back into the phone.
Yeah, few moments ago it hit me there could be a market for a phone case with in-built camera(s) that photograph your screen at a shallow angle on demand, and transform that into a screenshot automatically.
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?
We're heading for two devices, IMO. A useful one and one for communicating with bureaucracies.
That's exactly my idea. My phone is a lost cause, not really "mine" anymore. The good thing is that I stopped caring about the device. I take what's cheap and well supported (Samsung "A" series is the right kind of boring to me), no more expensive flagships.
The "useful device" is a laptop.
And a third one for membership apps.