Screenshots, the Gremlins of the Internet

I’m particularly fearful of screenshots because I take them all the time: I screenshot acquaintances’ Instagram stories that I think are stupid, or Twitter fights that give me secondhand embarrassment, or text conversations on which I need a second opinion—or third or fourth or fifth. I’m a gossip, and I use screenshots for good and for evil. I also live in constant fear that I’ve sown the wind with all my PNGs and JPGs, and that I’ll reap the whirlwind for my habit. What if I accidentally send a screenshot of a text exchange back to the person who was involved in it, rather than to the person who was supposed to analyze it? Or, worse, what if my own stories, tweets, or texts are being captured and ridiculed, or captured and eye-rolled, without my even knowing?

The rules for taking screenshots are, like their consequences, far from clear. A Google search for a simple question—“Does someone know when I screenshot them?”—will supply dozens of blog posts written with patience and empathy for the worried. In legal-advice forums, the nervous ask whether it’s against the law to show screenshots of a text exchange to other people, or if this would be a violation of the right to screenshot privacy. In r/AmItheAsshole, one of Reddit’s largest communities dedicated to questions of etiquette and human behavior, dozens of posts discuss whether it was okay to have screenshot something, though the responses show no discernible pattern.

However they’re created,…

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