You Can (Finally) Safely Edit a Screenshot on Your Pixel and No One Will Steal Your Information

These days, most of us have the good sense not to post personal information online. That’s why markup tools are so useful: you can quickly trim or censor any personal information from a screenshot, then securely send it anywhere. However, if you’re using markup on a Pixel phone, your edited screenshots aren’t as secure (at least they haven’t been until now).

As reported by 9to5Google , the issue is due to a markup bug that allows someone in the know to restore a large portion of the original image without your knowledge. If you take a picture of your driver’s license and then cover your face and other identifying information with markup on your pixel, an attacker could recover up to 80% of the screenshot, meaning that most of that censored information would be visible. The same can be said for a screenshot of a credit card with a number crossed out, or an image of a document with an address cut off. This bug even has a clever name: acrocalypse.

The researchers found that since the introduction of Markup in 2018, the feature will save the edited image in the same location as the original file without erasing the original. After you edit the image, it will become smaller than the original, but the rest of the image will go unnoticed by the user. All it takes is someone who knows what they’re doing to recover the vast majority of the original screenshot, sensitive information, and everything else.

Before you panic, there is a couple of good news. First, Google already has a fix: The March 2023 Android update includes a fix for this markup bug, so any screenshots edited with this tool should be safe. If you haven’t updated your Pixel yet, do so as soon as possible.

The second (mostly) good news is that many social networking sites process these images in a way that blocks attackers from exploiting the vulnerability in the first place. For example, if you tweeted one of these affected screenshots, you have nothing to worry about.

However, if you’ve uploaded a screenshot to a site that doesn’t process images in this way, that’s where the problems start. Right now the biggest culprit is Discord. This affects any image edited with markup prior to January 2023. Discord updated something at the end, so screenshots uploaded in the future should be safe.

However, you should never be too careful: if you’re wondering if one of your screenshots is affected, you can use this tool to check .