Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings

> 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.

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)

Lets blame laws and regulations for features private companies decide to implement, because I guess that will help us destroy the state.

Stop making up laws and regulations that dont exist.

> easily circumvented)

Or, you know, just take a picture of the screen with your phone.

Or record the session, or film it, etc etc etc

And the phone’s what I’d be using to exfiltrate anyway. I’d only screenshot on the work device for work purposes.

It’s not literally every Teams meeting.

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.

That was my first thought also.

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.

Not relevant at all.

This is like a watermark on a PDF. Not some impossible to circumvent security protocol.

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.

Or… y’know having a HDMI capture box with a trigger pedal.

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 Analogue hole Will never Die

That's the equivalent of sitting in a movie theater with a camcorder. Not important enough to bother crafting a solution for.

I'm pretty sure you can use some HDMI capture device to do that easier.

Totally irrelevant. This is there to protect an organization from itself. Think of it as a watermark on a PDF.

It exist to make the easiest way impossible and to tell participants that the content should not be shared by them.

> This feature will be available on Teams desktop applications (both Windows and Mac) and Teams mobile applications (both iOS and Android)."

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 things you mention are a dream for most corporate employees, where everything is locked on their computers.

They will just make photos using their phones.

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.

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.

People make mistakes. Why not put a simple control in that doesn't get in the way of any legitimate use?

You can’t really sniff out disgruntled employees until they act on it.

use your smartphone's camera next time. that puts the evidence on your device rather than your company's device.

it's probably going to be some DRM codec protection similar to Netflix where video goes black for screenshots.

I do the same. But I think you can just nicely ask the presenter to share the deck.

And adds an inconvenience. Easy enough to get around, but, now I have to add some extra effort to get around it.

Yes. Don’t take a screenshot of your teams meeting, you aren’t trustworthy. We will block that while we take a screenshot of everyone’s computer every couple minutes and run an LLM on it.

Why would Recall be allowed to screenshot DRMed content?

Does psr.exe no longer take screenshots?

Yeah maybe this is a way of preventing anyone else from creating a copilot competitor

Yea, this sounds like "Microsoft teams no longer supporting video on Linux and old versions of mac/windows" more than anything

They could just integrate Web DRM APIs like Google Widevine, Microsoft PlayReady, and Apple FairPlay, as both of them are integrated into the operating system and only work with a supported monitor. An HDMI splitter would likely not pass the test.

Streaming services like Netflix and Disney Plus use these APIs to protect their content as well.

My complete guess would be a legal team asked for this. You can easily imagine several scenarios that would prompt them to seek out a feature like this.

I think this because our company recently enforced a 2 year mail deletion policy on all mailboxes for "legal reasons." Which were "we don't want stuff to show up in discovery if we get sued."

Or, you know, just use the phone in your pocket

No. It is there to protect an organization from itself. It tells the participants that the content should not be shared by them.

It is essentially like a watermark in a PDF. It can be trivially defeated, but that isn't the point.