Material You (Monet) theme color as means of fingerprinting?

General
1

Update: Well, I should have known I am not the first one to think of it, yet I apparently liked imagining it.
Please post your input in one of these threads first:
How big of a deal is Android wallpaper fingerprinting?
Should wallpapers be mentioned in Android privacy?

Heyo, the thread about screenshots exposing EXIF metadata made me wonder what other not so obvious means of fingerprinting or outright identifying someone there are.

Of course you can argue...

that people might be aware of EXIF data on screenshots if they are already aware about them in photos, although with photos more people might be aware of data about location (permission is even asked) or camera model.

Anyway, as I was taking a screenshot to contribute, I realized I had set a specific Material You theme color.

Sure, there are presets that make you blend in, but especially if you opt for a color generated from your wallpaper (Monet), you might expose yourself via a very obscure way, which you might never have considered.
These colors are everywhere, not just in toggles. They are in your status bar buttons, notifications, keyboard color accents, Settings app background, etc..

Am I wrong about this? Did I overlook anything?

Of course anyone could choose whatever color, but as I see it, it is another vector to cross-reference someone, no?

2

Technically, yes. And if you are trying to remain anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) you should hide everything not related to what you share with black square

Also, not only color theme. Wallpapers and even status bar/bottom bar

So crop everything away, and try to hide with black squares…

3

I mean, it’s not only small areas sometimes. If you post a screenshot of an app like Settings or any Material You colored app, even the background is tinted.

This raises the question: Which color to choose if unavoidable?

The fixed blue one as it is a common favorite color? LineageOS stock wallpaper Monet green as it might be common?
Or possibly the most common color: a Google blue (is this even a thing anymore?) profile loaded with ColorBlendr?

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Also, now that I’m in this rabbit hole, you can even be fingerprinted by “Font size” and “Display size” settings (or in dev settings: “Smallest width” dpi setting or “Display cutout”/notch of your device).

Bad actors may not do it yet or don’t realize it can be done, but the possibility to analyze these is there.

4

That’s why I prefer sending only part of screen (so no full-screen resolution catches). You can randonly crop borders for better privacy too.

Also, if you are in exta sensetive situation (or just paranoid like me) you can use something like this approach:

Install util:

sudo apt install imagemagick

Use it to add noise to picture to make it more difficult for automatic tools to recognise what on picture:

convert photo.jpg -attenuate 1.0 +noise Gaussian noisy.jpg

photo.jpg - input file name, 1.0 - “power” of noise, Gaussian - type of noise, noisy.jpg - output

But this needs computer with Linux for convenience (but you can try Termux, imagemagick should whork there pretty fine)