LOL
Another stupid feature (enforced by regulations/law/policies) that has no real world use, besides making us users angry :-(
Like Google collecting all of our location history for their own usage, but not allowing us to see it via web anymore (only on mobiles), or having the android dialer not allowing us to record our own phone conversation (easily circumvented), or movie/music/game publishers not allowing us to backup our own media… you get the point.
All these are due to laws and regulations that are there to protect the big companies and don’t take into consideration users and the common sense ;-)
> All these are due to laws and regulations that are there to protect the big companies and don’t take into consideration users
This feature is not due to laws and regulations.
The user in this case is the presenter who clicks the button to enable screenshot protection on their meeting. This is Microsoft trying to deliver a feature their users want, not laws and regulations making them do something their users don’t want.
But it’s literally the dumbest feature ever. There’s absolutely nothing preventing a user from pulling out their phone and taking a picture of any slide they want. Or having a camera recording the whole session out of view of their webcam.
There isn’t a single user (presenter) that would ask something like this. Only a presenter that has to follow some strict “high security” procedures would enable something like this. A politician, for example, will have an excuse in case something leaks. The fact that with a simple mobile having a camera you can copy whatever is being presented (or with slightly more technical ways) is irrelevant for laws and procedures ;-)
Yeah, because blocking screenshots is security. How dumb could the world get? If you have sensitive information and a committed individual to leak those, then there is no way around if the picture is shared. What is next?
Startup idea: i-Secure. Your camera can only take/show photos of approved targets. All photos will be analyzed for safety. Unapproved/Unlocked camera devices from China are now illegal.
AFAIK, Google stopped making Timeline accessible on the web in favor of local-first storage to avoid having to give location data when subpoenaed by law enforcement (since they can't give away data they literally don't have access to). And they didn't want to deal with the headache of user privacy-related lawsuits, so they defaulted Google accounts into auto-deleting location history (which was already opt-in for years).
I could not figure out how to record phone calls on Android! No app worked. I know it is forbidden in the EU, but I forget so many important details from calls that this would be very important.
This is why I advocate for International DCO EPO day!
Because if we shut it all down, a huge chunk won’t start up, and humanity gains huge amounts of electricity generation back, but somewhat more importantly: maybe we could stop carrying smartphones!
(This is mostly in jest, here’s a “/s” for those who can’t tell)
Don't know why Android doesn't allow you to record the call with the dialer.
Google voice on the other hand allows this. Just hit 4 and you call is recorded. It is announced to all parties however.
Well, is there a reliable way to circumvent it without using a separate device? I cannot find anything that would just work on Android and not be paid.
Interesting how this will stop me from taking a picture with my mobile phone. The amount of effort people will go to, to make people's work more cumbersome. I am not screenshotting for espionage, I am screenshotting to accomplish my job.
100% this. If I have something juicy I want to show my wife about how they’re messing up our 401k’s, etc. I take a phone picture so that there’s no record of it happening on the official device.
Microsoft doing this is a huge waste of time other than catching the bottom 5% of people doing something like that.
I just want to add that my company has our stuff so locked down, that it’s easier for me to take a phone pic, transcribe the code with ChatGPT, fix the issue on my personal machine, then type it back into the work laptop for some issues. It’s absurd how businesses want to control everything to such a degree that 1) there are now these crazy, leaky workarounds, and 2) it’s to the detriment of people actually getting stuff done for the business.
I don’t know about you but sometimes it’s some small piece of information that isn’t worth contacting the presenter about. I need to call or craft an email, be polite and come up with some nonsense greeting maybe for a bullet point or two or a string I don’t want to rapidly shift focus to duplicate by hand. Then I have to sit around and wait for a response where they have to do the same, and I’m definitely not their priority.
Businesses want to control everything, so this will become a common default for people to use. It’ll be embedded in all sorts of company policies and I wouldn’t be surprised if Teams clients in some corporate domain can set it as a default option to help promote the policy (by default block screenshots on all our presentations to reduce liability risks).
If it’s like a paper, some data advertised, or some significant work that’s when you generally want and need to contact the author.
> I am not screenshotting for espionage, I am screenshotting to accomplish my job.
This is literally the threat model that this feature is protecting against: it gives presenters a way to say "no really, when I say don't record I mean don't record". If people end up overusing it at your company, that's a problem to address with them, but I can totally imagine use cases where you would want to turn this on just as an added precaution against accidental but well-intentioned misuse of the visual aids in a private presentation.
This isn't to protect against corporate espionage, it's to give presenters the option to be a little bit more clear about their expectations of confidentiality.
No, no, what they’re doing is making it harder for me to work around their (inevitably misplaced) expectations of confidentiality. This is one of those things that will be misused to hell and back so we’re better off not having the feature at all. It’s existence is a net negative to corporate employees everywhere.
Duplicate screen to another monitor outside of view of the camera is the low tech solution. The better one would be to get a HDMI splitter that can plug the feed into something to make a digital copy.
I love all the comments imagining complex technical workarounds while skipping right over the obvious workaround of using a smartphone camera to take a picture of the screen (which was mentioned near the top of the article that everyone read, of course). Modern camera phones are wide angle enough that it’s not hard to grab a shot of the monitor out of frame.
> These kinds of measures only stop the good guys from doing their jobs. The bad guys put way too much effort into espionage for this to work.
This is for preventing casual screenshots and reminding average office workers that meeting content is sensitive. It’s not an iron-clad tool for defeating dedicated espionage involving hidden pinhole cameras.
There have been similar arguments for ages about how if something isn’t iron-clad perfect protection then it’s pointless, but in the real world making something more difficult actually makes people think twice and stops most of the people who would casually do it.
See for example Snapchat’s screenshot notifications. It’s well known that there’s an elaborate way to circumvent it. However the fact that it takes a lot of work and there’s a risk of getting caught trying really hard to deceive the other party is enough to make most people not want to risk it.
Exactly right. The great firewall of China is another example - of it blocks 60% of people from outside content it is probably "good enough for government work".
Thank you for this. I'm honestly baffled about the quality of other hackers' comments on this topic. Many of them take the feature as a personal attack where it simply is an additional layer of protection against accidentally leaking confidential information. Then making statements that this prevents people from working, where they did not understand that taking screenshots from meetings where this is enabled is not working, but violating work guidelines. When the presenter enables this, they want people to not take screenshots.
This whole comment sections is honestly ridiculous.
> Modern camera phones are wide angle enough that it’s not hard to grab a shot of the monitor out of frame.
Pedantic correction:
'grab a shot of the monitor out of frame of the webcam of the person wanting to take screenshots of the meeting'.
First time I read it I was somehow imagining breaking of laws of physics lmao.
I suppose the biggest irony of this is, most of the shops that might want to enable this are already so sloppy that they half expect folks to screenshot teams presentations for notes later.
The vendors of the camera have the same interests of the vendor of the software. It is just a matter of time until the software watermarks the video and your camera automatically stops recording.
Users have to resort to (exclusively, if possible) open source tools.
The real solution is democratization of manufacturing. We need the ability to make our own hardware, our own computers. Then we won't need to suffer the silly policies of corporations.
It's not technically currently dead, but running a film movie camera pointing at your laptop during a Teams call is a bit out of reach of most. Even movies costing millions of credits are not shot on analogue any more.
Can you manufacture film yourself? Know anyone who does?
It could start with quietly making the essential chemicals in film production and development "controlled". Then you might need a licence to do analogue photography. Eventually even the last few analogue photographers either die or switch to digital due to the increasing impracticality of analogue. Then the film companies stop making it, then you make it illegal for them to start making it again. You've now killed the analogue hole.
Maybe you're hoping it would be futile like the war on drugs, except there's actually demand for drugs. I can't imagine dealers suddenly stocking up on illegal film for all the people wanting to capture stuff from their Teams calls.
I would say it's completely different. A camcorder movie has bad quality, most people would rather pay for a good quality movie than a free camcorder one.
For sensitive data on the other hand quality doesn't matter as long as it's readable.
But if it makes Microsoft’s claim untenable then it’s worth noting that security is only limited…a sweeping generalization that “screen capture is blocked” isn’t really valid anymore.
Making something more difficult is okay to claim in my view, but trying to over-state capabilities or security concerns is problematic.
This kills teams for Linux users since there is no desktop client so capturing can't be prevented. Linux users will be audio only in those calls.
The worst thing about this feature is that if someone takes a screenshot it will be saved on an IT controlled computer but if users are forced to snap screen caps with their phones the sensitive information ends up on personal devices and probably cloud synced to Google drive etc
At some point, you need to trust your staff. If you do not trust them to keep confidential information private, then why are you giving them the information in the first place?
I have some friends who work in a medical facility. They get an extreme amount of training on patient privacy laws and constant reminders not to get sensitive patient information on to their personal devices.
Despite the intense training and constant warnings, it happens constantly. And that’s just the cases they know about and address.
You have to be able to trust your staff, but you also have to be realistic that any organization at scale will have people who either don’t care or don’t think and it happens frequently.
Extreme amount of training? More like once a year online HIPAA test that everyone blows through with the occasional CISO phishing campaigns that at least one person fails.
The mistake being, what, accidentally sneezing onto the printscreen button so hard it depresses?
This isn't the same as leaving a tool in someone; making and misplacing a screencap take active doing. If your meeting participants actively want to put data where it doesn't belong, the solution isn't accident prevention
This is of course, incredibly stupid, due to the analog hole (which to be fair, is mentioned in passing by the article, but doesn't seem to be addressed at all by MS*.) Having this feature just guarantees it will get used, and possibly made into a standard compliance theater feature, hurting legitimate users for very little practical gain.
The only real practical gain is that it might prevent malware from being able to capture visible data, but what's funny about that is one of the desktop systems that can prevent unwanted screen capture by design (Wayland) also intentionally doesn't have any support for DRM/HDCP features, so it will likely be stuck on audio-only mode. High five, Microsoft!
* I wanted to go to the source directly to check if maybe they just left it out, but the link that they currently have seems to be non-sense. It seems to point to something about "Co-pilot" audio transcription. In Romanian, for whatever reason.
Most folks know this is easily defeated typically by viewing the content on another device (eg via casting it, remote desktop, phone mirroring, etc) or viewing it from within a VM, and then using the native screen capture functionality on the viewing device to record/screenshot whatever you need.
That being said - guessing they are doing this for their enterprise customers mainly, where alot of those other options are locked down. But plenty of people already know to just record their screen from their phone anyway - impossible to block that and much safer way to exfiltrate whatever info/data you need.
From the Article, if only to be pedantic enough that I agree with 'yes a browser might work'
> The company plans to start rolling out this new Teams feature to Android, desktop, iOS, and web users worldwide in July 2025.
OTOH we will see if there's any type of weasel-wording on whether browser is in fact non-supported (i.e. will go to audio-only mode.)
The other possibility, is that every 'supported' platform has some form of DRM that results in the functionality working even on browser (just thinking out loud about DRM functionality possibilities) means Windows/MacOS/Android/iOS all work but everyone else is out of luck.
"Easily" is temporary. There's already zero way to capture protected pixels on iOS. Cabled mirroring, screen casting, airplay, they're all blocked. Messaging apps are capitalizing on this with "screenshot protection for temporary media". Netflix has been doing it for ages. Jailbreak? Detected and blocked as "insecure device"
Maybe you can do it on not-iOS, until your insecure setup will be blocked by the server. Cat and mouse until there's 3 mice in the whole world.
Ran into this “feature” this week. So instead of grabbing a screen cap from my VDI I have to grab it from my primary OS and then email myself the image to cross that corp “boundary”. They recently disabled copy and paste between my computer and the VDI session as well.
That's quite unfortunate because due to a screen capture through Snipping Tool I got evidence of my org planning to fire me before even making announcements through a shared PowerPoint deck with a slide containing a org chart which shouldn't really be there at the time in the Teams meeting.
So from a employee POV it has its uses.
But people who will get in the same situation like me could simply use the camera on their phone pointed at the screen and be done with it, I guess.
I would always screenshot people's desktop/email when they started presenting, lot of people dig up decks in their email or they share their full desktop. Emails are useful especially when dealing with a vendor to see what other customers they are dealing with.
Readit News
Like Google collecting all of our location history for their own usage, but not allowing us to see it via web anymore (only on mobiles), or having the android dialer not allowing us to record our own phone conversation (easily circumvented), or movie/music/game publishers not allowing us to backup our own media… you get the point.
All these are due to laws and regulations that are there to protect the big companies and don’t take into consideration users and the common sense ;-)
This feature is not due to laws and regulations.
The user in this case is the presenter who clicks the button to enable screenshot protection on their meeting. This is Microsoft trying to deliver a feature their users want, not laws and regulations making them do something their users don’t want.
It is security theater at its peak.
Startup idea: i-Secure. Your camera can only take/show photos of approved targets. All photos will be analyzed for safety. Unapproved/Unlocked camera devices from China are now illegal.
Nobody forces them to make a presentation. They can always spend their time doing something else.
Deleted Comment
Because if we shut it all down, a huge chunk won’t start up, and humanity gains huge amounts of electricity generation back, but somewhat more importantly: maybe we could stop carrying smartphones!
(This is mostly in jest, here’s a “/s” for those who can’t tell)
Stop making up laws and regulations that dont exist.
Well, is there a reliable way to circumvent it without using a separate device? I cannot find anything that would just work on Android and not be paid.
Or, you know, just take a picture of the screen with your phone.
Or record the session, or film it, etc etc etc
Microsoft doing this is a huge waste of time other than catching the bottom 5% of people doing something like that.
I just want to add that my company has our stuff so locked down, that it’s easier for me to take a phone pic, transcribe the code with ChatGPT, fix the issue on my personal machine, then type it back into the work laptop for some issues. It’s absurd how businesses want to control everything to such a degree that 1) there are now these crazy, leaky workarounds, and 2) it’s to the detriment of people actually getting stuff done for the business.
It’s an option the presenter can turn on when needed.
If you need the data from the presenter to do your job, presumably you’d contact them and ask.
Businesses want to control everything, so this will become a common default for people to use. It’ll be embedded in all sorts of company policies and I wouldn’t be surprised if Teams clients in some corporate domain can set it as a default option to help promote the policy (by default block screenshots on all our presentations to reduce liability risks).
If it’s like a paper, some data advertised, or some significant work that’s when you generally want and need to contact the author.
Hey sorry to interrupt you but you blocked screenshots so please send me this frame. Also don't mind me I'll stop you again in 65 seconds.
This is literally the threat model that this feature is protecting against: it gives presenters a way to say "no really, when I say don't record I mean don't record". If people end up overusing it at your company, that's a problem to address with them, but I can totally imagine use cases where you would want to turn this on just as an added precaution against accidental but well-intentioned misuse of the visual aids in a private presentation.
This isn't to protect against corporate espionage, it's to give presenters the option to be a little bit more clear about their expectations of confidentiality.
I suppose if the presenter wants no screenshots they’d also want cameras on and you’d have to be pretty sly about using your phone.
Either way, dumb. The analog hole can’t be closed.
This is like a watermark on a PDF. Not some impossible to circumvent security protocol.
These kinds of measures only stop the good guys from doing their jobs. The bad guys put way too much effort into espionage for this to work.
> These kinds of measures only stop the good guys from doing their jobs. The bad guys put way too much effort into espionage for this to work.
This is for preventing casual screenshots and reminding average office workers that meeting content is sensitive. It’s not an iron-clad tool for defeating dedicated espionage involving hidden pinhole cameras.
There have been similar arguments for ages about how if something isn’t iron-clad perfect protection then it’s pointless, but in the real world making something more difficult actually makes people think twice and stops most of the people who would casually do it.
See for example Snapchat’s screenshot notifications. It’s well known that there’s an elaborate way to circumvent it. However the fact that it takes a lot of work and there’s a risk of getting caught trying really hard to deceive the other party is enough to make most people not want to risk it.
This whole comment sections is honestly ridiculous.
Interestingly that can be overcome by moving the video just a little between two screens, which reverts it back to a WDDM surface. =D
Or TWO monitors, with "Duplicate" selected, and a camera recording the second monitor under the desk.
Pedantic correction:
'grab a shot of the monitor out of frame of the webcam of the person wanting to take screenshots of the meeting'.
First time I read it I was somehow imagining breaking of laws of physics lmao.
I suppose the biggest irony of this is, most of the shops that might want to enable this are already so sloppy that they half expect folks to screenshot teams presentations for notes later.
Deleted Comment
Users have to resort to (exclusively, if possible) open source tools.
Can you manufacture film yourself? Know anyone who does?
It could start with quietly making the essential chemicals in film production and development "controlled". Then you might need a licence to do analogue photography. Eventually even the last few analogue photographers either die or switch to digital due to the increasing impracticality of analogue. Then the film companies stop making it, then you make it illegal for them to start making it again. You've now killed the analogue hole.
Maybe you're hoping it would be futile like the war on drugs, except there's actually demand for drugs. I can't imagine dealers suddenly stocking up on illegal film for all the people wanting to capture stuff from their Teams calls.
I can totally imagine that they will do something similar,so I guess it's pretty simple to implement if done like that
It exist to make the easiest way impossible and to tell participants that the content should not be shared by them.
For sensitive data on the other hand quality doesn't matter as long as it's readable.
Making something more difficult is okay to claim in my view, but trying to over-state capabilities or security concerns is problematic.
Deleted Comment
The worst thing about this feature is that if someone takes a screenshot it will be saved on an IT controlled computer but if users are forced to snap screen caps with their phones the sensitive information ends up on personal devices and probably cloud synced to Google drive etc
Despite the intense training and constant warnings, it happens constantly. And that’s just the cases they know about and address.
You have to be able to trust your staff, but you also have to be realistic that any organization at scale will have people who either don’t care or don’t think and it happens frequently.
1) Prevent the patients from suing after a data breach or intentional sale of their medical records, regardless of negligence.
2) Transfer as much money as possible from health care to privately owned businesses in the compliance industry.
Very few computer security lessons from that industry generalize to other parts of the economy.
This isn't the same as leaving a tool in someone; making and misplacing a screencap take active doing. If your meeting participants actively want to put data where it doesn't belong, the solution isn't accident prevention
The only real practical gain is that it might prevent malware from being able to capture visible data, but what's funny about that is one of the desktop systems that can prevent unwanted screen capture by design (Wayland) also intentionally doesn't have any support for DRM/HDCP features, so it will likely be stuck on audio-only mode. High five, Microsoft!
* I wanted to go to the source directly to check if maybe they just left it out, but the link that they currently have seems to be non-sense. It seems to point to something about "Co-pilot" audio transcription. In Romanian, for whatever reason.
https://www.microsoft.com/ro-ro/microsoft-365/roadmap?id=490...
That being said - guessing they are doing this for their enterprise customers mainly, where alot of those other options are locked down. But plenty of people already know to just record their screen from their phone anyway - impossible to block that and much safer way to exfiltrate whatever info/data you need.
Seems like it’s even easier, just join the meeting via browser.
I’m not familiar with a way to enforce this type of restriction in the browser.
> The company plans to start rolling out this new Teams feature to Android, desktop, iOS, and web users worldwide in July 2025.
OTOH we will see if there's any type of weasel-wording on whether browser is in fact non-supported (i.e. will go to audio-only mode.)
The other possibility, is that every 'supported' platform has some form of DRM that results in the functionality working even on browser (just thinking out loud about DRM functionality possibilities) means Windows/MacOS/Android/iOS all work but everyone else is out of luck.
They will just make photos using their phones.
Maybe you can do it on not-iOS, until your insecure setup will be blocked by the server. Cat and mouse until there's 3 mice in the whole world.
So from a employee POV it has its uses.
But people who will get in the same situation like me could simply use the camera on their phone pointed at the screen and be done with it, I guess.