iOS 14’s new privacy feature have It has been cheating on many spy apps for the past few days, raising user concerns and hopefully inspiring the companies behind the apps to do something about it. The last apps caught were LinkedIn and Reddit, although the Companies want to assure users that they are fixing it.
LinkedIn users reported the snitch on social media, which is that the LinkedIn application copies the content of users’ clipboards with each keystroke. iOS 14, which is still in beta, Notify users when this happens with a banner alert. IOS 14 apparently discovered that the LinkedIn app was copying clipboard content for apparently no reason from multiple devices.
LinkedIn was able to copy clipboard information from multiple devices because iOS has a Universal clipboard, according to 9to5Mac, which allows Apple users to seamlessly copy text, images, and photos to one Apple device, and then paste the content to another Apple device.
G / O Media may receive a commission
A LinkedIn spokesperson he said to ZDNET This was due to a bug in the company’s iOS app and unwanted behavior. Erran Berger from LinkedIn vice president of engineering, addressed the problem directly on Twitter.
“We have traced this to a code path that only verifies the equality between the clipboard content and the content currently written in a text box.” Berger said. “We do not store or transmit the contents of the clipboard.”
On Friday, Berger said LinkedIn would fix the error. Saturday tracing He said that LinkedIn had released a new version of its app on the App Store without the code.
The Reddit inspection was also reported by users using iOS 14 beta and shared on social media. A Reddit spokesperson he said to the Verge it does not store or send contentadding who was launching a solution today.
“We trace this back to a code path in the post composer that checks the URLs on the dashboard and then suggests a post title based on the content of the URL text,” said the Reddit spokesperson. “We do not store or ship the contents of the carton. We removed this code and released the fix on July 14. “
LinkedIn and Reddit aren’t the only apps that have been caught copying the content from the clipboard. Researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk have published a list of more than 50 iOS apps they do the same One of the applications that caught the most attention in the list was TikTok, which is not exactly a privacy role model.
According to Bakry and Mysk, TikTok has stopped doing so in a new update.
There are some fairly well-known apps on the list, which classify apps into news, games, social media and other categories.–including CNBC, Fox News, New York Times, Accuweather, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Overstock, and Weather Network, among many others.
How observed by LifehackerAlthough discovering that these applications are accessing your clipboard can be troubling, there are legitimate reasons for some of them to do this. For example, the Chrome search app searches for URLs, while the UPS app searches for tracking numbers.
Leaving out legitimate uses aside, it’s definitely concerning when random apps that don’t perform clear and useful services like the ones cited above access your clipboard for no reason. What are these applications doing with the information they copy? Why do weather applications need to copy information from my clipboard?
Hopefully all these new eyes on the subject help businesses and app developers realize that snooping is unnecessarily not great
.
