The clipboard in your Apple’s iPhone is used to temporarily store data that has been copied from one application and pasted into another application. Only one item in an app can be stored at a time. The problem is that when you copy some important data to the clipboard, such as a bank account number or a social security number, some applications can get this information directly from their clipboard.
Even a boring weather app may be spying on your iOS clipboard
According to Digital Trends, the first public beta version of iOS 14 revealed that TikTok is still accessing its subscribers’ clipboard with iPhone. TikTok is the extremely popular short-form video app that has had a lot of controversy. Occasionally, TikTok has been the most popular application on the App Store and Google Play Store. But the Peterson Institute for International Economics called it a “Huawei-sized problem” in terms of security concerns. And last November, TikTok’s father, Beijing ByteDance Technology Co., was under investigation by the United States government for failing to get the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to verify its purchase of $ 1 billion of Musical.ly. The latter is supposed to investigate the purchase of a US company by a foreign company.
In February, a couple of developers encountered a problem with the copy-and-paste system on iOS that left confidential information unprotected. One of the developers who discovered this issue, Tommy Mysk, told Digital Trends that as of WWDC 2020, the issue was fixed thanks to a feature in iOS 14 that displays a banner alert to iPhone users when an app is reading a user’s clipboard. The Telegraph reports that when the beta version of iOS 14 was released earlier this month, users began receiving notifications revealing that apps like AccuWeather, AliExpress, Call of Duty Mobile, Google News, Overstock, Patreon, and yes, TikTok. Jeremy Burge, the “Director of Emoji” at Emojipedia posted on his Twitter account how often TikTok accessed his iPhone clipboard. The video shows that each or three taps that TikTok was trying to grab the content from Burge’s clipboard. Every time TikTok attempted this act, Jeremy was warned. Another video posted by Ryan Jones shows how iOS 14 warns users when their clipboard is spied on.
Okay, so TikTok is grabbing the contents of my clipboard every 1-3 keystrokes. iOS 14 is making fun of it with the new paste notification pic.twitter.com/OSXP43t5SZ
– Jeremy Burge (@jeremyburge) June 24, 2020
Due to the large number of iOS users and its creation by a Chinese company, TikTok is a great concern for some security experts. In March, TikTok told the Telegraph that it would stop eavesdropping on the clipboards of iOS users only to continue the practice three months later. TikTok claims that the type of clipboard eavesdropping it was doing in March is different from what it is doing now. It is the same as saying that a criminal who killed someone with a knife is not a serial killer because he used a weapon to kill his second victim. Emojipedia’s Burge said that the current TikTok inspection takes place every time a user touches a punctuation mark or the space bar while typing. That means TikTok can spy on your clipboard almost every second, a scary prospect if you copy sensitive materials using the clipboard on your iPhone.
We are not saying that you should install the first beta version of iOS 14 just because of the new feature that will alert you when one of your apps reads your clipboard. There are still too many bugs for this update to be viable for your daily driver. But as soon as the public version of iOS 14 is removed, assuming there are no major issues, you may want to install it right away.
