I don’t underestimate friction, I just know even my grandma would reach for her camera for a picture of her screen and she doesn’t even know what a screen capture is. It’s a stupid feature that doesn’t create friction, it just encourages users to take an untraceable action.
I would FAR prefer recording who took a screenshot than blocking it as a presenter.
Everyone knows this. You don’t need this survey (which surely was a real thing that actually occurred and not something you just conveniently imagined for this argument, right?) to tell you that.
It’s literally written in the linked article.
We know. There are ways around it. But it’s friction, and friction has value. People know it’s not perfect, but it’s another reminder that people aren’t supposed to be doing it.
It’s a solution searching for a problem it can’t solve.
Friction implies you’re stopping a user from taking an action they consider the easiest way to solve the problem. Since you think I “invented” the survey, I invite you to ask all of you non technical friends and family how they would go about capturing an image of their computer screen if they needed to quickly show you a copy of what they’re looking at.
I absolutely guarantee you that taking a picture with their phone will be the winner by an order of magnitude.
The friction pushes the flow into something even worse — while not actually changing the behavior.
Yes, somebody who's clever enough would keep the camera away from view, and maybe would try several times first to hold it in a way that gives a good view of the screen, etc. But this is out of scope, it's a clear malicious intent, when we could expect much more sophisticated means.
It would be surprising if Teams does not already capture that kind of event in its user activity event trail[0].
The amount of privacy-invasive capturing and reporting that Teams does is so staggering that it can probably rival surveillance that of North Korea on its own citizens.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/activi...
Either the information your are sharing is sensitive, or it is not. Applying friction to your colleges is just making their jobs more difficult.
The friction here is on the "unwanted" path, and in a way provides "lube" (less thinking and care) for the correct security posture.
This feature provides value because it increases friction. It won't stop really determined and motivated users from leaking, but it'll make leaks, especially accidental leaks / those due to hacks, a lot less common.
The same applies to DRM, "security by obscurity", social media post editing / deletion, dark patterns, loss leaders, promotions and coupons, the list is endless.
If your user is a perfectly rational being with infinite time and infinite tech savviness, the proverbial "spherical cow", those features make 0 sense. Just like spherical cows, though, those users don't actually exist, and so friction matters.
That doesn't mean friction is infinite, though. It's too easy to overestimate it and fall into the trap of thinking that "users won't bother doing this, it doesn't matter if this combination of actions loses us money, it's too bothersome", and then get very surprised very quickly.