Together they amount to an intimate archive of a person’s daily life online-sometimes sweet and funny, sometimes damning, often rather dull. However they’re created, most screenshots are born into a quiet, unassuming life. In r/AmItheAsshole, one of Reddit’s largest communities dedicated to questions of etiquette and human behavior, dozens of posts discuss whether it was okay to have screenshot something, though the responses show no discernible pattern.
In legal-advice forums, the nervous ask whether it’s against the law to show screenshots of a text exchange to other people, or if this would be a violation of the right to screenshot privacy. A Google search for a simple question-“Does someone know when I screenshot them?”-will supply dozens of blog posts written with patience and empathy for the worried. The rules for taking screenshots are, like their consequences, far from clear. What if I accidentally send a screenshot of a text exchange back to the person who was involved in it, rather than to the person who was supposed to analyze it? Or, worse, what if my own stories, tweets, or texts are being captured and ridiculed, or captured and eye-rolled, without my even knowing? I also live in constant fear that I’ve sown the wind with all my PNGs and JPGs, and that I’ll reap the whirlwind for my habit. I’m a gossip, and I use screenshots for good and for evil. I’m particularly fearful of screenshots because I take them all the time: I screenshot acquaintances’ Instagram stories that I think are stupid, or Twitter fights that give me secondhand embarrassment, or text conversations on which I need a second opinion-or third or fourth or fifth. It’s a fact we all live with but force ourselves to forget, in order to keep texting and posting and chatting and screenshotting in (something like) peace. The idea that anything and everything you do online could be-and let’s face it, probably is-captured by someone, somewhere, and then stored for future use, has imbued our lives online with a latent sense of paranoia. The feature never materialized, which we can be sure of because we still live in a society.īut screenshots themselves are very real, and sometimes equally terrifying. Others dug in their heels and promised never to stop screenshotting their texts: “iOS 11 is gonna have screenshot alerts so if you get a notification from me you can pull up honestly I could care less,” one man wrote on Twitter.
Apple users imagined total mayhem, or the necessity of owning two phones-one for daily use, and one for photographing the other phone.
An iPhone software update was coming, and the anarchists at Apple had decided to add a new feature: Starting soon, your device would register every screenshot that you grabbed of a text conversation, and notify the other participants.
In early 2017, a terrifying rumor began to drift around the internet.