After Tik Tok, the next App that has problems with the content of what the user has copied to the clipboard is LinkedIn. iOS 14 reveals that the App accesses the content of the clipboard continuously, without warning the user and for no apparent reason.
LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard every keystroke. IOS 14 allows users to see each paste notification.
I’m on an IPad Pro and it’s copying from the clipboard of my MacBook Pro.
Tik tok just got called out for this exact reason. pic.twitter.com/l6NIT8ixEF
— d (@m0nald) July 2, 2020
iOS 14 shows you a message on the screen every time an App accesses what we have previously copied to another App. In the case of Tik Tok, it was somewhat deliberate, in theory to fight bots that publish spam comments on this social network… or at least, that ‘s what they have indicated before eliminating that function. In the case of LinkedIn, it seems to be a bug, they have simply escaped a code that reads the clipboard obsessively, as they have in a tweet in which one of the managers of the company replied directly.
LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard every keystroke. IOS 14 allows users to see each paste notification.
I’m on an IPad Pro and it’s copying from the clipboard of my MacBook Pro.
Tik tok just got called out for this exact reason. pic.twitter.com/l6NIT8ixEF
— d (@m0nald) July 2, 2020
It’s hard to believe that something like this is a bug and that until now they have never noticed it, but there we have it. A company spokesperson has argued that the bug consists of a small program that reads the contents of the clipboard to verify that it is the same as what is typed. If so, what use could this functionality have for them or for the user?
Apple has had a huge success with this new privacy enhancement implemented in iOS 14, and it’s a shame they haven’t done it before. Now, any App that reads what we have copied in another will have to justify why they do it if they do not want the user to think that they are trying to acquire more data than they should. In this case, LinkedIn copies the content of the clipboard with something that was obtained on another device, because thanks to iCloud, the clipboards of both are synchronized. For this reason, it says that it has copied the text from another device and not from another App.
After seeing this, it is clear that the best advice we can give is that you should never copy very sensitive information, such as a credit card number or a password because any App that you open later could be reading and storing this information.