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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday July 07 2020, @07:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-a-quick-peek dept.

Reddit and LinkedIn stop copying iPhone clipboards:

Reddit and LinkedIn are changing their apps to prevent them from looking at the Apple iPhone clipboard.

In a developer trial of the latest update to the phone's operating system, iOS 14, users are notified whenever an app accesses the device's copied text.

The notification exposed frequent scanning of the clipboard by apps that many users thought should not need to do so.

The two firms follow TikTok in changing their apps amid the criticism.

[...] In research published in March, Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk identified dozens of apps which they said had accessed the clipboard.

At the time Apple said it did not think it was a vulnerability.

There are legitimate reasons why an app needs clipboard access - for example, in order to share a website address with a message platform, or to grab a password from a password manager and paste it into a password-protected service.

Related:
Reddit says it's fixing code in its iOS app that copied clipboard contents
Apple iOS 14 Alerts Reveal Reddit App Is Reading User Clipboard Data
Reddit promises to stop accessing user clipboards after being exposed by iOS 14

Previously:
(2020-06-28) TikTok and 53 Other iOS Apps Still Snoop Your Sensitive Clipboard Data
(2020-02-27) Apple Takes Heat Over 'Vulnerable' iOS Cut-and-Paste Data


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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:06PM

    by looorg (578) on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:06PM (#1018203)

    It's not about if there are legitimate reasons to have access to the clipboard or not. There clearly are cases when this is useful and needed. But that wasn't the case in the article.

    The notification exposed frequent scanning of the clipboard by apps that many users thought should not need to do so.

    This is the issue. They are scanning the clipboard even when you don't need it or asked for it. Probably as some kind of "feature". A feature they couldn't defend when asked about it, cause it probably made no sense. If you as a user press the button to fetch something from or send something to the clipboard that is just fine. Not the issue here.

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