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A LinkedIn spokesperson said ZDNet yesterday that a bug in the company’s iOS app was responsible for an apparently intrusive privacy behavior detected by one of its users on Thursday.
The problem was discovered using the new beta version of iOS 14.
For iOS 14, which will officially launch in the fall, Apple has added a new privacy feature that displays a quick pop-up window that lets users know when an app has read content from its clipboard.
Using this new mechanism, users last week saw how the Chinese mobile app TikTok was reading content from its clipboard at regular short intervals.
TikTok said the feature was part of a fraud detection mechanism and that the company never stole the content from the clipboard, but promised to remove the behavior anyway, to reassure users.
This week, users continued to experiment with this new iOS 14 clipboard access detection system. Yesterday, a developer of the Urspace.io portfolio creation portal discovered a similar mechanism in LinkedIn’s iOS app.
In a video shared on Twitter, the developer of Urspace showed how the LinkedIn app was reading clipboard content after pressing each user key, even accessing the shared clipboard feature that allows iOS apps to read clipboard content. macOS of a user.
LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard every time a key is pressed. IOS 14 allows users to view each paste notification.
I am on an iPad Pro and it is being copied from my MacBook Pro clipboard.
Tik Tok has just been called for this exact reason. pic.twitter.com/l6NIT8ixEF
– Don urspace.io (@DonCubed) July 2, 2020
After ZDNet Last night she contacted LinkedIn to comment, a LinkedIn spokesperson told us that the behavior was a mistake and not intentional behavior.
Erran Berger, vice president of consumer product engineering at LinkedIn, also reached out on Twitter to clarify the problem and promised a solution.
“We have traced this to a code path that only checks for equality between clipboard content and content currently written in a text box,” Berger wrote on Twitter.
“We do not store or transmit the clipboard content. We will follow up once the solution is active in our application,” he added.
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
