screenshots, and the limits of "no save"

plenty of apps say media can't be saved. it's worth being precise about what that can and cannot mean. the gap between the two is where people get hurt.

the rule

if a picture reaches someone's screen, their device has the pixels. every protection is applied after that point. so every protection is a matter of effort, not possibility. anything claiming otherwise is describing a wish.

what the features actually do

• disabled long-press and right-click. removes the one-tap "save image" gesture. genuinely useful -- saving stops being something you do without thinking, and becomes something you decide to do. defeated by a screenshot.
• screenshot blocking. possible on android. not reliable on ios. never on the web. defeated by a second camera pointed at the screen.
• blurred previews. the picture isn't legible until the viewer chooses to uncover it. worth having against a glance over someone's shoulder, and a bored scroller never uncovers it at all. but the blur is drawn by their device, over an image it has already downloaded. it decides who bothers looking -- not who could.
• screenshot notifications. these don't prevent anything. they change the social cost. that's a real effect on people who care about being caught, and no effect on anyone who doesn't.
• disappearing media. limits how long the copy on the server exists. does nothing about a copy made while it was visible.
• watermarking with the viewer's name. doesn't stop the copy. it makes a leaked copy traceable. the strongest deterrent on this list -- and it costs the viewer's privacy to get it.

so what's the point

raising effort is not nothing. most copies aren't made by a determined adversary. they're made because saving was one tap away, and someone did it without much thought. remove the easy gesture and you remove most of those.

but it should change how you decide, not how you feel. the number that matters is how many people see it, not what the app promises about saving. one careless viewer out of five is a manageable risk. one out of five thousand is a certainty.

how sissy-haven handles this

media is no-save across the whole app. long-press and right-click never offer to save.

and to be straight about the ceiling: screenshots still work. so do developer tools. so does the media link itself. saving stops being a one-tap gesture, and that is the whole of what we're claiming. the real protection is that you chose how many people ever saw it -- try the matching for what that looks like, and what "delete" actually does for the other half of the same argument.

if a small chosen audience is the protection you actually wanted, that's what this is.