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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

The security implications of this are interesting. There are some apps, namely Snapchat and Instagram, that guarantee privacy by taking advantage of the phone APIs that inform the app about screenshots. You can in theory work around those today with rooted/jailbroken phones, but those are a tiny part of the ecosystem.

But if everyone can run Snapchat on Windows, that kinda changes the whole game, unless they support the same APIs. But even then, it seems like it would be trivial to block that API.

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How is Windows currently guaranteeing safety of DRM'ed media content? I seem to recall that you cannot play back some types of content on Windows for example if kernel debugging is enabled. Maybe they aren't that far from being able to guarantee that pixels aren't being grabbed for apps that do not want to have their pixels grabbed?

You have always been able to run Snapchat and android apps on Windows via emulators like MEmu.

Sure, and on Mac too, but it's not easy and rarely done.

This will make anyone able to do it.

Indeed. Automating and botting various apps seems like it'd be easier as well.

This is solved by Instagram and Snapchat not being in the Amazon App Store.

That’s a bit of a mitigation but I feel like someone will figure out how to extract the apk and throw it up on a web page somewhere.

This seems backwards to me. Sure, apps should be at the mercy of they system when they want to use system-level features (interacting with other apps, accessing mic/camera, etc). But why should an application get to dictate which system features a user can invoke (taking a screenshot)?

Snapchat doesn't block you from screenshooting, but it notifies the other person if you do.

> why should [applications] get to dictate which system features a user can invoke?

They shouldn't, but they do it anyway because virtually no users know how to "cheat", and most don't even know that they can cheat. The justification is that taking a screenshot violates your or someone else's privacy or security. In the case of security, they assume you're too dumb to know better.

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