[godelski]

In some sense they are. But being protected either from a consequence of my own stupidity or a consequence of their lack of security. I think the worst part of all is that these "bandaids" are being used in place of actual security. I don't need to be protected from my own stupidity nor do I need security theater.

[mr_mitm]

I think the threat model here is that a different, malicious app (compromised, installed accidentally or by the means of social engineering) might take screenshots of your screen and forward them to take advantage of you. You can file this under one's "own stupidity" as well, sure, but in the end they're not protecting you, they're protecting themselves, because banks might be liable for these kind of things, and by imposing these restrictions, they're reducing the amount of fraud and thus improve their bottom line.

[shmel]

Are you implying that Google is unable to distinguish whether a screenshot is triggered via a combination of hardware buttons vs via a software call from another app that isn't even on the foreground in their own ecosystem? That's a quite sad state of affairs, isn't it?

[Zak]

I've been unimpressed with Google's commitment to making the fundamentals of Android great. They seem to prefer doing the minimum required there and putting all their efforts into something more sexy, like generating fake photos that look like they were taken with a 2400mm lens.

I don't want my phone to generate fake photos; I do want it to always let me manually take screenshots, but require turning on a permission that's a little awkward to find to allow an app to do so.

[teaearlgraycold]

When you don’t control the hardware a lot is off the table.

[freedomben]

This is a fine excuse for most everyone, but not Google. They can control the hardware significantly and in some cases like pixel, completely.

They no longer believe in owner control. Either that or they consider themselves the device owner, which is even worse IMHO

[godelski]

Sounds like a marketing opportunity to sell more Pixels and get closer to their current dream of becoming Apple

[franga2000]

I see this argument everywhere and I've never heard of a case where a bank was liable because a customer was phished. I've even asked for examples and nobody ever provided them.

It's one thing to argue in court that they should be liable because they didn't provide you with the necessary security tools (like MFA), but they all provide at least SMS 2FA these days and their apps run on iOS and Android, both of which have plenty of security features.

[cwillu]

If a bank is required to reverse fraudulent charges (and they are), that means they're liable for those charges.

[izacus]

In reality what happened is that some security auditor put it into a checklist for the mobile app "Security ISO certificate++" and now everyone implements it for compliance.

Fighting against that is insane paperwork and professional exposure for software engineers that do it (since if people get phished, the C-suite will point a finger at a tech lead which went against the "professional security audit").

Most of other posts here are just post-rationalization and victim blaming.

[godelski]

So let's have more of these conversations so the idiots making those standards make fewer dumb rules and we can grease the wheels for anyone passionate enough to try to get it changed

[BrandoElFollito]

Unfortunately the idiots are often the nation's security agency, or a large consulting company.

You will not have them change their policies if they do not have a good person inside, who will slowly move the boat.

I fought for audit findings because they were pissing me off at a personal level and it wirked. But the auditor did not change their procedure, just reverted the finding. Until the next year.

[godelski]

I think you're making the naïve assumption that large organizations are heterogeneous.

The people at the top are idiots because the idiots were able to secure advisory positions. They were able to secure positions because those promoting them were either tricked or idiots themselves. This pattern repeated all the way down.

So I really do mean grease the wheels. And I really mean we won't kill the beast overnight. But we won't make any progress towards fixing things if we won't look at how the problems are created in the first place. We'll only perpetuate the problems if we oversimplify things, as that's exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

There was a Microsoft Terminal Server "monitoring" application that worked by recording the screen through a series of JPG screenshots. It worked surprisingly well and bypassed all kinds of controls.

[AnthonyMouse]

> they're protecting themselves

[citation needed]

The theory here is that it provides a marginal security improvement if there is malware on the phone, but if there is malware on the phone then there are a hundred other things it can do to the same effect and you're likely screwed anyway. And by doing this, you also block the user from taking screenshots, which is bad, because screenshots are harder for computers to parse, and that's a marginal security advantage. If the user is going to send e.g. their account number to someone else (for a legitimate reason), it's better that they do it as a screenshot than that you force them to type it as text, because text is machine searchable. Which is worse when that messaging system gets compromised and then the attacker can do a text search for a pattern matching a bank routing number and be more likely to discover that message than if it was only there in a JPG.

Meanwhile the primary consequence of preventing screenshots is to inconvenience customers, which is an actual cost to the bank, because there is only a threshold amount of BS customers will put up with before switching banks and banks are constantly pushing up against that line already with all of their other BS.

But then the lower-quality banks do it anyway because there is a box they can check which sounds like it's locking something down, so they check it without thinking. Which is a great canary for customers who want to know if their bank is dumb -- if they require this then they probably do all kinds of other dumb stuff and it's a strong indication you should switch banks before you get screwed by them doing some other foolish nonsense.

[high_na_euv]

>because screenshots are harder for computers to parse, and that's a marginal security advantage. If the user is going to send e.g. their account number to someone else (for a legitimate reason), it's better that they do it as a screenshot than that you force them to type it as text, because text is machine searchable. Which is worse when that messaging system gets compromised and then the attacker can do a text search for a pattern matching a bank routing number and be more likely to discover that message than if it was only there in a JPG.

Tbf it is 2025, not 2010, it isnt that hard

[godelski]

Tbf, one could make the argument that there would have been far fewer resources dedicated to computer vision had companies made the data more accessible and had we modified PDFs to make it easier to copy test.

People will go to great lengths to bypass annoyances. Excessive false alarms is even called "alarm fatigue"

[AnthonyMouse]

Isn't it though? You compromise some email provider so that you have read access to the emails of a million people going back 20 years. Literally many billions of emails with petabytes of attachments. Can you do text search on all of that text? Absolutely, an ordinary PC could do that in a realistic amount of time. Can you search the text within all of those images using some kind of computer vision system? Not without your own power plant.

[high_na_euv]

>Absolutely, an ordinary PC could do that in a realistic amount of time

Bilions of emails? No, it cannot, not even store it, let alone process it fast enough to make usable

[godelski]

I think you made bad assumptions. If I installed the APK through a third party, sure, my bad. But then I agree with shmel, that there's still some blame on Google. Like why not have a default where we disable screenshots not performed by a physical action and have an advanced option for API based screenshots? It's not bulletproof but neither is the current implementation.

But if I install via the playstore like most people then no, I don't think it's the user's fault. Testing every single app seems like a big ask but we're also talking about a 3 trillion dollar company. I mean FFS a 1 trillion dollar company didn't even exist 10 years ago and 10 years before that a 500b company barely did. So I think they can stand to lose some profits and do harder work. Really, if we don't hold these companies to high standards then that bar just continues lower and it's a race to the bottom. They'll be as lazy as we let them be

[Aerroon]

It doesn't really protect anything though, because you can always just use an external camera to take a picture of your screen.

[Cloudef]

Its probably meant to try mitigate damage in case bad actor gets remote access to your phone or you have malware.

[godelski]

Sounds like they need to spend more money on security and their "good enough" solutions aren't actually good enough.

[const_cast]

If your phone is remotely rooted, the screenshot is providing no security.

[ncruces]

It protects less proficient users from accidentally taking a screenshot.