Apple has added a notable privacy tweak to iOS 18.3 and iPadOS 18.3 about cropping out areas from full-page PDF screenshots on your iPhone and iPad.
You probably know that the screenshot tool on your iPhone lets you capture a full-page screenshot in any iPhone app. I often use this feature to screenshot full-height webpages in Safari, as well as notes and emails. You can save the scrolling screenshots as an image to the Photos app, as a PDF to the Files app, or both.
In iOS 18.2 and earlier, however, using the crop tool on full-page scrolling screenshots doesn’t actually remove cropped-out content when saving the image as a PDF. This can compromise your privacy because any cropped-out areas get saved and could be revealed with specialized software.
iOS 18.3: Privacy warning when cropping PDF screenshots
To fix this, Apple has added a message to the screenshot tool in the third betas of iOS 18.3 and iPadOS 18.3 to inform you that cropped content isn’t gone for good.
When saving a cropped screenshot in the built-in screenshot tool as a PDF, you’ll see a warning message informing you that “the cropped content is not removed from the PDF.” The privacy message explains that even though “content outside the cropped area won’t be visible in most PDF viewers,” it can still be “made visible in some apps.”
This is true when saving an image as a PDF document—screenshots saved as regular images cannot be restored from cropped-out portions. This doesn’t apply to edits made in the Photos app. Using the crop function and other non-destructive tools in Photos lets you undo edits and revert back to the original.
You must tap OK to dismiss the dialog. The message pops up whenever you save a full-page screenshot as a PDF in the Files app; it doesn’t appear when using the built-in Markup feature to edit and annotate a PDF in Notes or Files.
iOS 18.3 also temporarily disables Apple’s unhinged AI notification summaries for news articles and entertainment content.
The right way to redact sensitive info on PDFs
Be careful when using apps to redact content on PDF documents on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Many third-party apps simply use a black highlighter or add a black box on top of sensitive content like personal information.
That actually saves the black box as a vector object in your PDF; you think your secrets are safe, but I can use a third-party editor to recover redacted information from your PDF just like that!
What you want to do instead is actually remove sensitive content before putting a black box in its place. This can be done with a proper redact feature in Adobe’s Acrobat, Readdle’s PDF Expert, or a similar trusted app.
Apple’s built-in Preview app on the Mac has a Redact feature that permanently removes redacted content from your PDF. “Any content marked for redaction will be permanently deleted when the document is closed,” reads a message that appears after you choose the Redact option from the Tools menu.