Comment on In North Korea, your phone secretly takes screenshots every 5 minutes for government surveillance

Rooskie91@discuss.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• dan@upvote.au ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I was going to say “that article seems to just debunk the ‘my phone is always listening to me’ conspiracy theory” but then I got to the part about over 50% of analyzed Android apps having permission to take screenshots :/

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  • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Out of over 17,000 Android apps examined, more than 9,000 had potential permissions to take screenshots. And a number of apps were found to actively be doing so, taking screenshots and sending them to third-party sources.

    this is a weird paragraph. no permission is needed for an app to take screenshots of itself. all apps can do that.

    just an example: the Element matrix client has a bugreport feature that allows you to submit an automatically created screenshot of the previous menu.

    it seems there are several ways to accomplish this: stackoverflow.com/…/how-to-programmatically-take-…

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    • dan@upvote.au ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Do those code snippets on the Stackoverflow post allow you to capture the entire screen regardless of which app is open, or do they only allow you to capture the app the code is running in?

      Capturing the app itself makes sense (for things like bug reports) but does Android really let any app capture whatever is on the screen?

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      • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        no, they only allow the app to capture its own screen content. to make a regular screenshot of the whole display, the app needs a permission that the user has to approve every single time, at least on most phones. that API is actually for continuous screen recording, but of course usable for this purpose too. this also means that after getting approved by the user, the app can keep its recording sessions to keep more screenshots, but that ends when the app gets killed by android. I think the system also shows a notification when an app is recording, but as anything that too could vary with phones.

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  • Akip@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Smart-tvs are in the same boat

    en.wikipedia.org/…/Automatic_content_recognition#…

    pcmag.com/…/own-a-vizio-tv-it-may-have-spied-on-y…

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    • dan@upvote.au ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      This is why my TV is on a separate VLAN (with no internet access) and I use an Nvidia Shield for streaming. I haven’t seen any indication that the Shield does anything like this.

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      • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Yeah, there is no reason for me to be connecting my TV to the internet. I use a HTPC which is much better for streaming than the TV’s built-in apps.

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