We recently covered that TikTok was caught reading users’ clipboards on iPhone and iPad thanks to new iOS 14 privacy features. This week, iOS 14 users also noticed that the LinkedIn app is copying and pasting from the clipboard on the fund for no apparent reason, which raised some concerns.
iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 include a new banner alert that lets users know if an app is pasting from the clipboard, which is part of a series of new privacy features Apple is adding to its operating systems this year.
This particular feature of the clipboard is already exposing the behavior of some popular apps like TikTok, AccuWeather, AliExpress and now LinkedIn.
You can see the LinkedIn app sticking to the clipboard content every time a key is pressed on a video shared on Twitter by user @DonCubed. Since iOS has a universal Clipboard, the app can even read what’s being copied to other devices registered with the same iCloud account.
A LinkedIn spokesperson said ZDNet that the problem is just a software bug and not an expected behavior. Erran Berger, vice president of consumer product engineering at LinkedIn, says, “We do not store or transmit the clipboard content.”
Hi @DonCubed I appreciate you raising this. We have traced this to a code path that only checks for equality between clipboard content and content currently typed in a text box. We do not store or transmit the contents of the clipboard.
– Erran Berger (@ eberger45) July 3, 2020
It’s not hard to imagine that many apps will be updated to stop reading users’ clipboards before the public release of iOS 14 later this year. Again, this reinforces that Apple is right to implement more privacy features on iOS.
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