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Reddit and LinkedIn are changing their apps to prevent them from seeing Apple’s iPhone clipboard.
In a developer test of the latest update to the phone’s operating system, iOS 14, users are notified every time an app accesses text copied from the device.
The notification exposed frequent clipboard scanning by apps that many users thought it shouldn’t need to do.
The two companies follow TikTok to change their applications amid criticism.
A senior LinkedIn executive tweeted that the code that enabled this had already been removed, while Reddit said it would launch a solution next week.
“We trace this into a code path in the post composer that checks the URLs on the dash and then suggests a post title based on the content of the URL text,” Reddit told tech site The Verge.
He added that he did not store or receive the clipboard content, and said the solution will launch on Tuesday, July 14.
Meanwhile, Erran Berger, vice president of consumer products for LinkedIn, responded to a tweet from someone who noted that the app was asking to look at the clipboard with “every keystroke.”
Berger replied that the application was performing a “equality check” to see if what was on the clipboard was the same as what was written in the application, but gave no further details about it.
He also said that LinkedIn did not store or receive the data, saying that a new update in the Apple app store removed the code.
Last month, TikTok said it had searched the contents of Apple’s iPhone clipboard to avoid “repetitive and unwanted behavior”, and has now removed the feature.
In an investigation published in March, Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk identified dozens of apps that they said had accessed the clipboard.
At the time, Apple said it did not believe it was a vulnerability.
There are legitimate reasons why an application needs clipboard access, for example, to share a website address with a messaging platform, or to get a password from a password manager and paste it into a password protected service.
