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Comment by DecentShoes | Hacker News Reader

No OS or app should be able to stop me taking screenshots. Not my phone, not my desktop. It's MY device. I should be able to take screenshots of whatever the hell I want.

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And I have the expectation that my OS not take constant screenshots of what I’m doing (Microsoft Recall), which is what this Signal feature is trying to prevent. You’re welcome to turn the feature off so that Microsoft can store screenshots of your Signal chats.

As are you welcome to turn Recall off.

I agree with you, but this particular one seems to be a feature you can toggle off. It's a tradeoff between that said freedom and privacy.

Are you upset about DRM in general? Or that Signal, by default, prevents Windows from capturing the Signal window when it screenshots the screen every few seconds?

because it sounds like Windows is the problem here, doing this screenshotting at all. And Signal allows you to disable the anti-screenshotting measure

That's off-topic:

1. You can disable that feature in the Signal settings (they say it in the post)

2. They don't have another way because of Microsoft (they say it in the post)

Did you read the post?

Second this. What's the point of this security aspect when everyone has their pocket cameras in their phones? This is nonsense.

The same is true for spyware installed on employee computers. Google laptops will snitch on you if you even attempt to attach USB drive. While there is HDMI and KVMs, there is no point of having these restrictions.

> What's the point of this security aspect when everyone has their pocket cameras in their phones?

It's not to stop the people from screenshotting. It's to stop the accidental exposure via some screenshot or some other mechanism.

Apps take screenshots all the time, e.g for crash reporting. Then they phone home with them. Most apps obviously ask politely when this happens but I’m sure there are exceptions. Not to mention malicious apps. There is no real security or isolation for screenshots that I’m aware of so app one will happily snap a picture of app two, without needing special permissions. That other app can be your password manager or baking browser tab. So apps explicitly opting into being in the picture is perhaps not such a bad idea.

“ To help mitigate this issue, we made the setting easy to disable (Signal Settings → Privacy → Screen security), but it’s difficult to accidentally disable. Turning off “Screen security” in Signal Desktop on Windows 11 will always display a warning and require confirmation in order to continue.”

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