LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, has been sued for secretly spying on user clipboard data, including clipboard information that syncs between Apple devices. The LinkedIn app was caught accessing clipboard data without any user permission thanks to a new iOS 14 feature that notifies the user when an app accesses any content that is copied or pasted from another app.
The lawsuit has been filed in federal court in San Francisco by New York resident Adam Bauer. The lawsuit attempts to be classified as a class action lawsuit based on violation of California law. The complaint states that LinkedIn has been secretly snooping on user data not only on iPhones, but also on other user devices, such as iPad and Mac.
LinkedIn had previously responded to this issue and claimed innocence that this was happening due to an error in the framework in use by the company. A new version of the application will be released soon to solve this problem. However, the problem is not only that the application accesses the data once, but accesses it repeatedly, all the time. This means that the application has read any password, credit card number or other confidential information that users have copied to their clipboard.
For its part, LinkedIn is not new to privacy and security flaws. Take a look at our previous coverage:
In addition to LinkedIn, TikTok, Reuters, Google News, AliExpress, and many other popular apps, they’ve been caught snooping through the clipboard data without permission via iOS 14. Many of the developers have responded and promised software updates to fix the ‘bugs’ But one can imagine that if these companies were not caught, the problem would have continued undetected.
Now that Apple has exposed apps that are snooping on user data without permission, the company should add a new permission setting on iOS and iPadOS so apps have to ask for permission when they first want to access clipboard information. The permission can be permanent or temporary, similar to how you manage locations and access to Photos. While Apple is at it, you should even add similar permissions to macOS. Considering the amount of clipboard data synchronized between Mac, iPhones, and iPads, there may be macOS apps that silently read clipboard data without getting caught.
