mistakes ยท post 02 of 7 in this channel
The screenshot of your WeTheNorth order
Taking one is a reflex. Where it goes afterwards is not a decision anybody made.
the three wethenorth market addresses
hn2paw7zfvndw3dovycegeqmvvnf4pl67b3g2p7pohjlzavloosh73id.onionhn2paw7zrgujyhnt6mgxlt2q6uhgbke4itpqitxhyfbumq3wtnckbuyd.onionhn2paw7zadwkcra3qzv5e4q547i7e5lvxm62cfxqftuqdu7moiu2ceyd.onionprinted the way they were handed over. no labels, no numbering, nothing here says which one to try first. this feed never opens them, so it has no status light, no percentage and no date of checking to give you.
why people take them
To keep an address. To keep a recovery phrase. To keep an order reference. To show a vendor a problem. To have a record in case something goes wrong.
All of those are reasonable intentions. The screenshot is a bad instrument for every one of them.
where it goes
Into the picture library on the device. Which, on most modern phones and many computers, syncs to a cloud account by default and has done since the device was set up.
That is the part nobody decided. The syncing was arranged years ago and it applies to this file the same as to everything else.
So a screenshot of a market page is now a file in a general purpose cloud account, associated with an identity that has a name and a payment method attached.
and it is searchable
Photo libraries read the text inside images now. That is a genuinely useful feature and it means the words in your screenshot are indexed.
A picture of an onion address is not an opaque blob to the system holding it. It is text, in a searchable index, in an account with your name on it.
it also does not work as storage
You cannot paste from an image. So a screenshot of an address guarantees that you will type it out later, which is the mistake in typing the address.
One bad decision reliably produces the other. That is why these two posts sit next to each other.
the recovery phrase case
This is the worst version. A screenshot of a recovery phrase is a photograph of the keys to the account, in a synced library, indexed by text search.
The post on the recovery phrase says to write it on paper, and this is the reason it says that so firmly.
what to do instead
Copy text as text. Store text as text, somewhere you chose deliberately rather than somewhere that was already syncing.
If you genuinely need an image, for a vendor or a dispute, take it, use it, and delete it in the same sitting, including from wherever the deleted items go.
And check what your device does with screenshots once, so you are not guessing about it later.
That check takes a couple of minutes and it settles the question permanently for every screenshot you ever take. It is one of the few things in this channel with a fixed, one time cost.
Most people have never looked. The setting was made during the first ten minutes of owning the device and has not been thought about since.
There is nothing careless about that. Nobody sets up a phone expecting to think about where screenshots go, and the default was chosen by somebody optimising for a different situation entirely.
replies
a reader askedMy phone does not back up photos. Is a screenshot fine then?
the answerIt is much better, and it still cannot be pasted, so it still pushes you into transcription. Text is the right format for text.
a reader askedI already have screenshots. What should I do?
the answerDelete them, including from wherever your device parks deleted items for a month. Then check whether copies made it to a cloud account, because that is the copy that outlives the phone.
a reader askedIs a photo of paper better than a screenshot?
the answerIt is the same file in the same library. The camera roll does not distinguish between a picture of a screen and a picture of a page.
what this post is not Not a claim about what any specific service does with your files. It is about defaults that were set long before this order existed and that nobody revisits.