Choose a db you’re comfortable with, create structures in it that represent your files and their location in your filesystems, add more structures that represent metadata and then query it when you need to find things.
It’s what phones do.
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.
It’s also the ops bubble. My replies are generally directed at the op and their post.
I will also point to the requirement though, that us visa applicants give up social media account names or be subject to denial as evidence that it’s considered normal.
If it wasn’t considered normal to have social media then the cbp wouldn’t be so quick to implement that process.
The ol’ sarcasm detectors’ flashing red, ringing the bell and pouring black smoke out of all the panel joints but yes: if you want to fit into society it’s important to have social media.
If you wanted to live a private life in the 1970s, would it be better to descend from your cabin hundreds of miles from civilization with a wild mane of shaggy hair wearing your homemade leather suit or with an unstylish but kempt haircut, nondescript jeans and shirt and military duffel bag looking like any other of the myriad characters wandering the roads at the time?
Obviously you’d want the latter. Part of privacy is blending in so that you don’t arouse interest.
Nowadays if you want to be a private person and still interact in society, like the op, you need to have all the trappings of a someone who doesn't raise alarm bells. That includes, especially as your age drops, social media.
Social media is literally normal.
It has gone through a process called normalization in order to become an expected part of social interaction. The op even said that people expect them to have a particular type of account and they feel like not having one excludes them from having more friends.
Yes, you are normal if you have a social media account and abnormal if you don’t.
Anyone have any advice?
Yes: recognize what you’re trying to accomplish and change your actions.
Privacy requires shutting people out of your life. Meeting new people requires letting people into your life.
If people expect that the first “gate” into your life is your social media then meet that expectation. Have a social media presence. Post shit that you want people to see on it.
If you’re afraid of letting the companies that operate social media see your life, examine why. It may be that you’re perfectly fine with the trade off of a limited hang out in exchange for looking normal. Most people are.
It doesn’t have to be instagram. You could have a snapchat or a tiktok or whatever.
No, you can’t.
You are not the hero, effortlessly weaving down the highway between minivans on your 1300cc motorcycle, katana strapped across your back, using dual handlebar mounted twiddler boards to hack the multiverse.
If ai driven agentic systems were used to obfuscate a persons interactions online then the fact that they were using those systems would become incredibly obvious and provide a trove of information that could be easily used to locate and document what that person was doing.
But let’s assume what the op did worked, and no one could tell the difference.
That would be worse! Suddenly there’s hundreds of thousands of data points that could be linked to you and all that’s needed for a warrant are two or three that could be interpreted as probable cause of a crime!
You thought you were helping yourself out by turning the fuzzer on before reading trot pamphlets hosted on marxists.org but now they have an expressed interest in drain cleaner and glitter bombs and best case scenario you gotta adopt a new pitt mix from the humane society.
This isn’t a very smart idea.
People trying to obfuscate their actions would suddenly have massive associated datasets of actions to sift through and it would be trivial to distinguish between the browsing behaviors of a person and a bot.
Someone else said this is like chaff or flare anti missile defense and that’s a good analog. Anti missile defenses like that are deployed when the target recognizes a danger and sees an opportunity to confuse that danger temporarily. They’re used in conjunction with maneuvering and other flight techniques to maximize the potential of avoiding certain death, not constantly once the operator comes in contact with an opponent.
On a more philosophical tip, the masters tools cannot be turned against him.
I didn’t know they fixed metadata on screenshots, good looking out!
I distinctly remember a time when most phones would pass their model in the headers. That may have passed though!
I gotta ask: where would you put “awareness of screenshot size uniqueness” on a continuum from insane schizo shit to reasonable private person?
I guess if there was a security flaw in your device then a screenshot could tell an attacker that you have the flawed device but there’s other, more subtle, ways a person could do that which don’t require that they acquire a screenshot somehow.
And I guess there is some platonic ideal of a private person who wants to share a screenshot, a literal pixel perfect copy of what’s on the screen on their device, but would also like to conceal the specific model from the person they’re sending the contents of their screen to.
It just seems like the kind of information cognizance of which would be useful in a vanishingly small number of scenarios.