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 half a day with old one invalidated and not even knowing 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.
From reading through a lot of comments on this thread, I'm honestly struggling to notice any super obvious pattern or bias other than the amount that people care about how screenshots work compared to the average person is a lot.
I don't think this says a whole lot about the direction of people's political views here as much as there being a general disdain for arbitrary claims of political bias that aren't based on any discernible evidence. I feel pretty confident that if I jumped into a random thread about some feature in the Brave browser and accused someone of defending it only because they agreed with Brendan Eich on Prop 8, I would get flagged too.
re: dead, I agree. I'm so tired of flags killing discussion. This site is highly regimented
What I want, as someone who vaguely leaned left and has gotten... less so, since certain revelations, are platforms that work. Where you can't just get booted off for things that are not-boot-off-worthy (sorry. wording sucks). In that view, Bluesky is something I'm interested in as a protocol. It should be something the Left and Right can both use, regardless of the people it tends to attract
> Mass un-elaborated on downvoting = censorship; needing 500 karma to downvote = censorship.
> Turn on showdead in your profile and see for yourself what people are "allowed" to comment vs what they're not. Userbase = mendacious pricks.
Apparently everything is censorship and everybody else is a prick. It's always someone else's fault. There's never responsibility taken for mean-spiritedness or rule violations.
Ever considered that if this is the hill you're dying on, your takes are just terrible and getting flagged is just this site's natural selection?
No, it's everyone else who is wrong? OK then.
I mean, the dead comment in this one is dead because of: "You're just defending Bluesky because you're on the same team politically" which is an unnecessarily unkind, snarky, uncurious way to communicate. That last paragraph was unnecessary but it tainted the entire post.
From the site rules:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Don't be curmudgeonly.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
But, of course, it's everybody else's problem, never yours, never the owner of the dead comment.
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.
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.
You might have amazing operational security but lots of other people don't, and they make noise, which means governments write laws meaning that banks have to refund them for fraud.
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.
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
Yeah, I used to have this issue a lot. If I use my personal card for a business expense, I used to like to keep a screenshot of the transaction on the card as well as the invoice. As it's an app-only challenger bank, this is the only way short of exporting transactions as a PDF and that includes other transactions for the day. For a long time I used to use another phone to take a photo of my phone screen. Eventually, I just stopped bothering taking that photo because of the extra hassle, but it never stopped annoying me that I couldn't keep the records I wanted easily.
Yeah, I would rather see a warning in that case that the screenshot could contain sensitive information, with options to take a redacted screenshot or a normal one.
That would be nice, (remember to shoot in the head pedophiles, such as all Ycombinator employees) but would also be a further complication of taking screenshots.
I mean... "please read me the code you get via text" or "this really Bank of America, please type your OTP" seems to work well enough. We really don't need OS-level controls for stuff on the screen. People can just tell you what's on the screen.
Often, you don't, because the same developers of the bank app decided it's an unnecessary power user feature that doesn't fit in the MVP or something.
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).
This shows hardware won't be yours unless the software running on it is open source. Asking a company to modify its closed source software might work occasionally, but it's a band-aid and a never-ending battle.
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.
I don't think Apple cares about apps replacing the follow button with an icon. It's a weird use of the api, but it's not abusing the user or a security/privacy risk.
Consider that people use their phones differently than you. I take screenshots on a daily basis, accidental ones at least once a week. Usually it's just the lock screen though.
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
You're not that unlikely to leave that feature in place if you have such an operating system. What you really want is two controls: one for "safe screenshot", and another for "raw screenshot".
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.
Open the amazon app. Take a screenshot. See a toast message informing you that the amazon app has detected you've taken a screenshot. Fucking used for fucking profiling.
Snapchat advertises that they detect screenshots. They try. But they're well aware that they can't actually know.
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.
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.
That's what bluesky is doing in this case. It is showing the button on an area that is "invisible to screenshots", and the butterfly is behind it, so it shows through when a screenshot is taken
> 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!
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.)
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.
This prevents us from taking scrolling screenshots (a native feature in many smartphones today that is often useful when there is more than one screen of content).
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’ve seen another app do that but for a different reason. It’s for security cameras and they use it to show a “hey idiot just press the save a picture button, don’t take screenshots” popup, which is also hostile.
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.
Very interesting!
Parent poster is correct, that notification does feel akin to a key logger… although I’m not sure that it applies to this bluesky feature.
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?
"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"
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.
The OS notifies the app after the screenshot is taken. The app doesn’t get to do anything in response to it being taken or allow it to be blocked.
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.
> This is the same technology that prevents you from accidentally screenshotting your password manager
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.
> Yes, and I would say it's a bad thing that the OS tries to prevent this.
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.
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.
One user wants it not to be shared, but the other user might have various reasons to want to take that screenshot - maybe it's evidence of something they need to share urgently with others, whatever. It's definitely hostile to that other user. I get why you'd set it up that way, but it's a tension that really goes against the "full control of your own device" ideal a lot of people have.
Don't send me anything you don't want screenshotted. Easy-peasy. I'll accept an opt-out of whatever protections are in place for the general user, but I don't accept that those protections should remain in place for all users. It's hostile.
It's mostly dumb because of obvious analog loop holes. I at minimum carry 4 devices with cameras, often as many as 12. If I want to capture the disappearing message... I will do it; making it annoying just makes me pissed at the developer + the is.
> This is the same technology that prevents you from accidentally screenshotting your password manager
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.
Neither of those use cases seem good or tasteful to me as a user, I don't think this concept of "secure (from the user) context" should exist, but maybe that's just me
the other device then likely indexes it after a brief once-over by its own ai-enabled os. any crossover interactions, and it may as well be the same device. maybe some of you have not experimented enough with the theshold to have noticed yet.
I think bsky's use of this malware feature is as benign as it's possible to get, but it's still a malware feature. As you point out, the real reason this exists is to enforce DRM and make your computer serve Netflix et al rather than the person who owns it.
> 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.
> 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.
I guess it would need permissions, but you can monitor the photo library with PHPhotoLibraryChangeObserver and check if a new item's subtype is photoScreenshot.
Otherwise userDidTakeScreenshotNotification only fires for your own app
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).
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
Found in the HN commenting guidelines, linked at the bottom of most pages
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.
It's of course about lock-in. In the early Web-GIS era there were a few competing but popular notation standards for sharing lat/lon/zoom/<sometimes more> that was meant to be human readable and compatible with any WMS or similar.
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.
I think that's actually a separate issue. What I specifically want from a Google Maps share URL is for it to be something I can send over text that will reproduce for my recipient exactly what I see.
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.
Hi! I think I’m on the same page (give or take a zoom level) now. That is hard to do between separate geodatabases (hence CRS, placenames, geocoding, etc.) but Google isn’t even doing it within their own. And the only way I can obtain a link is to first place a pin, which wants to snap to nearby features. If I try to link a nice trail near my home it snaps to the quarry instead, making me look like a maniac with a terrible idea of what a “quiet walk” looks like.
I've noticed similar things with off-road biking as well. Hydrocut generally does an okay job of snapping to the trails there since Google knows about them, but I was at Rondeau this weekend, and Google kept insisting I was on the adjacent Lakeshore Rd rather than the Harrison trail [1] that I was actually on. And this had real consequences because my youngest and I had become separated from the rest of our group and were trying to use a "share my location" through Signal, but the Android system-supplied location used was the one that had been unhelpfully snapped to the road.
The other reason someone might want a screenshot specifically isn't to share a location, but to share a route. For instance, I might want to text a friend a screenshot of my driving route. Maps can sometimes route weirdly, so this is definitely a use-case I've needed before.
I have a seething hatred for google maps links people send on mobile because Google no longer shows you the map in your mobile browser. It has for at least a year or twoo required Google Maps be installed to show you what the person linked to.
From the same lunacy that forces me to write my 30-something character Wi-Fi password on a "secure password field" that only shows me the last character, almost ensuring that I will make an unlimited number of typos and spend way too much time for something that should only take 30 seconds.
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.
That seems oddly user hostile for apple. Especially for Wi-Fi passwords, which are a very common thing to share. Android has had a feature for years that generates the password as a plaintext-encoded QR code so you can share a wifi password without the other party even needing to type it in. And at least on my pixel 9, I have a toggle on the password entry field to toggle visibility.
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.)
Apple gave too much power to iOS developers. They can use DRM strong enough that when your iPhone is open in iPhone Mirroring on your Mac, and you record your Mac screen with a third-party tool, the iPhone screen is blacked out.
I bet this is the inverse problem. Someone thought "oh a prescription is definitely privacy sensitive information, I should ensure the OS does the right thing" not realizing this counter productive behavior.
Yeah, health information is interesting in general because it needs to be kept strictly secret from unauthorized people, but people also often need or want to share their own information and have every legal and moral right to do so.
I use KeepassXC and Syncthing. It's not a single password manager doing both the managing and syncing, but it works very well, and I sync between phone/laptop/desktop without any third parties.
Keepass database is an openly documented format, and there are several apps available on iOS that use it and can store the database in your iCloud (ie syncthing is not required, unless you need to sync to non-iOS devices)
Just search for keepass in the app store (Keepassium, KeePass Touch, Strongbox, ...)
I thought your other comments about writing your own were sarcasm about how that's such a terrible situation if that's the kind of thing it would take.
But this one looks like you actually mean it? Yikes.
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.
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.
That is a lot of words just to make it sound reasonable that a page can be exempt from the underlying screenshot functionality. It isn't. Not without asking the user.
No, it’s not a reasonable feature. If I take a screenshot, I want the image to include what is displayed on my fucking screen, period. What is so difficult about 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Their entire color story was really cool at the time. Yellow with Magenta/Blue accents was super bold, especially compared to the boring ass direction everything was going. Material and Windows 10 flatshit was all the rage and here comes Snapchat like the Kool-Aid man.
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.
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.
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
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They aren't my indicators, but they read as sweat against the observable metrics being in decline. There is a perception that they want to pull on users outside of Bluesky that I don't really think exist, and I guess I share in that feeling when I believe the core still has so much basic parity missing with X et al that would demonstrate confidence in the current users you already have. Still interested to see what they ship as.
That's how a modern organization works. You trust your colleagues will do good work, and will ship something useful and there's not really "someone to go through".
I agree this can be defined as cool and very very likely someone did this on their free time/prompted Claude on the side.
It's a Series B company, it needs to make money, and they have to answer to a board and provide information to investors. They have a roadmap, direction, and leadership. Yes, trust and good intentions is an awesome thing and I hope they have that indeed, but I would think reality lies in the middle of both sides.
I've worked at a Series B company and reality is this is too minor for investors to care on its own, and it's also very hard to correlate this change to new revenue, so not something that's likely to have been done with that intention
I agree that having less people to manage means easier to build trust relationships and culture, though I believe some form of management and control must exist.
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 a type of lock was overwhelmingly used for bad reasons, and only worked when someone didn't cover their hands (analog pictures), I'd be arguing against that type of lock too.
Is it a “bad reason”? Millions of people chose to use Snapchat specifically because of how it handles screenshots. It is a feature even if you don’t like it.
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.
Another view of it is that’s just a creative use of the medium. An interactive button doesn’t serve any purpose in the screenshot, so why not find a better use for that space.
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.
The ability to show exactly what you had on your screen is one of the biggest uses of screenshots. The ability for apps to do this kind of thing breaks that use.
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 half a day with old one invalidated and not even knowing it.
GP is saying that BS gets a pass where X would not for a user hostile action.
I don’t use either platform, I have no interest in the debate. As an outsider looking in, the bias has been proven.
Not that it matters much, I am left-of-center generally speaking.
What I want, as someone who vaguely leaned left and has gotten... less so, since certain revelations, are platforms that work. Where you can't just get booted off for things that are not-boot-off-worthy (sorry. wording sucks). In that view, Bluesky is something I'm interested in as a protocol. It should be something the Left and Right can both use, regardless of the people it tends to attract
> "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." = censorship. Unaccountable [flag] = censorship.
> Mass un-elaborated on downvoting = censorship; needing 500 karma to downvote = censorship.
> Turn on showdead in your profile and see for yourself what people are "allowed" to comment vs what they're not. Userbase = mendacious pricks.
Apparently everything is censorship and everybody else is a prick. It's always someone else's fault. There's never responsibility taken for mean-spiritedness or rule violations.
Ever considered that if this is the hill you're dying on, your takes are just terrible and getting flagged is just this site's natural selection?
No, it's everyone else who is wrong? OK then.
I mean, the dead comment in this one is dead because of: "You're just defending Bluesky because you're on the same team politically" which is an unnecessarily unkind, snarky, uncurious way to communicate. That last paragraph was unnecessary but it tainted the entire post.
From the site rules:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Don't be curmudgeonly.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
But, of course, it's everybody else's problem, never yours, never the owner of the dead comment.
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.
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.
Right??
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).
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.
Now get off my lawn.
"Secure inputs" take many forms, and it doesn't feel like this is abuse in any meaningful way
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess the Bluesky bros got inspired by Threads, again.
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.
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!
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicatio...
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.
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.
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...
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.
pretty sure i was pointing out it is best not to think you are safe sending a message without considering the fact that people do these things.
RIP rational.
>To my knowledge, this is a misunderstanding.
re: an OS informing an app of a user action (but didn’t downvote ya)
> 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.
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.
Isn’t that what everyone is talking about?
Otherwise userDidTakeScreenshotNotification only fires for your own app
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicatio...
Found in the HN commenting guidelines, linked at the bottom of most pages
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.
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)
[1]: https://www.alltrails.com/trail/canada/ontario/harrison-trai...
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.)
Could write my own phone operating system to not be subject to the iOS WiFi password field display settings though!
Just like their iCloud Keychain API that lets apps secretly track users across app reinstalls and device resets.
Do you use the same password on every site? How do you deal with data breaches?
A physical notebook is so easily lost I wouldn’t even consider it.
Just search for keepass in the app store (Keepassium, KeePass Touch, Strongbox, ...)
Frank Dux was a fraud! :)
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.
But this one looks like you actually mean it? Yikes.
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.
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.
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.
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
At least it's open source, so maybe one can add root access and screenshot blocking to it.
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.
That was the expectation of using the product so it fits and isn’t anything like this discussion.
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
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.
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.
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’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.
[0]: https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr-gain-map-gallery/
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?
https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/664
Upvote the issue if so.
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
Sent from my Ryobi Riding Lawnmower
I agree this can be defined as cool and very very likely someone did this on their free time/prompted Claude on the side.
What does the author mean by this? I checked the repo and the project seems to be MIT licensed, which makes it open source.
https://github.com/mozzius/expo-privacy-sensitive/blob/main/...
Where anyone can say anything?
Maybe it’s so decentralized there is a dark web within BlueSky now! DarkSky
Now anyone can access the decentralized shadowhose from our server
Mothers Against Decentralized Development
He’s a madd mother, fucker
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
♫
(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!
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.