How can certain sites and services block you from taking screenshots or sharing screens?

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For example Netflix doesn’t allow to take screenshots, and in discord if you try to screen share the window is black.
I’m sure that other sites do it as well.

In: Technology

15 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think other posters may have missed the question in ‘How’ do they do it, not why, I’m going to try and explain in terms of iPhones (this is my first ELI5 answer!)

When you take a screenshot pressing the button tells the app you have open that the user has just hit the screenshot combo of buttons, most apps ignore this but others either record it or even further then throw up something else for the phone to capture.

iOS uses something called views (I’m not an expert, only started learning last week!) which presents the information to you on the screen, when you hit the screenshot button something called **.UIApplicationUserDidTakeScreenshot** is passed to the app, the app can then use that notification to temporarily show the user a different (blank) view for the screenshot, before continuing on as normal.

There is probably other calls like this on other platforms like Windows, Android etc

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