Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Your iPhone model can be found or narrowed down from a simple screenshot (lemmy.ml)

submitted 12 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

When you send a screenshot (even if height/width only is cropped) , the screenshot's width and height can be used to find the iPhone model of someone or narrowed down.

The most unique sized iPhone on the market right now is the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max, as no other phone has the same width and height. So if you send a screenshot people will 100% know your exact phone. The regular iPhone 16 is common with the rest of the other phones and not unique.

If you send a screenshot from a iPhone XR, people can know if you using an iPhone 11 or iPhone XR since they have the same dimension which narrows down alot of options. (828x1792)

You can use this site here to view a list of all the dimensions. Click the iPhone's tab and sort the physical width or height.

If you don't want to expose your phone model, crop both width and height of each screenshot randomly. I would suggest cropping out the top of the phone as it shows your time if you care about that. Some sites like X have random inaccurate dimensions in uploaded screenshots, which is different from the original raw screenshot.

I haven't really checked with android phones, but it's probably the same thing.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 hour ago

schizoposting 👍

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

If you go to a website your phone reports its model number to that website. If it doesn’t then that website can (and often does) use javascript to figure out what model it is with, among other things, viewport size.

Unless you have taken the time to turn it off, your phones model is embedded in the metadata of the screenshot you took.

Before anyone takes action based on this post, consider critically weather your device and usage pattern merit concealing your phone model from people or other entities.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

How specific is your threat model that information about which phone you use can be used to track you? And if it is, why are you sharing screenshots in the first place

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 hours ago

Thank you

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

What do you think someone could possibly do with knowing a phone model given they wouldn’t be the only person with one

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 hours ago

Privacy isn't necessarily about risk for everyone. For some it's more about their individual right to privacy, and to uphold that right they need to be aware of ways in which it may be breached. So this is probably not practical information for most people (I certainly don't care) but it's useful to share nonetheless.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 hours ago

i'm guessing that it may "help" if a person is already being targeted and now the phone model also is known

🤷