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 2 days ago by lock@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

15 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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[–] lock@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's bad op-sec and general privacy. What if you don't want anybody knowing you use a old burner phone? Some people even hide there timezone even though millions of people have the same one, RFP hides your timezone aswell. People don't share there birthday even though they aren't the only person with it even without the year. It's about connecting the dots with multiple pieces of information, and this is one of them.

[–] J_on_LemmyML@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

Thanks for explaining! Honestly just never thought about it, I don't tend to share screenshots/pictures to the public so never crossed my mind.