We recently covered that TikTok was caught reading users’ clipboards on iPhone and iPad thanks to the new privacy features of iOS 14. This week, iOS 14 users also noticed that the LinkedIn app is copying and pasting from the clipboard in the background for no apparent reason, which raised some concerns.
iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 includes 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 clipboard feature is already exposing the behavior of some popular apps like TikTok, AccuWeather, AliExpress, and now LinkedIn.
You can see the LinkedIn app pasting from the clipboard content every time a key is pressed in a video shared on Twitter by user @DonCubed. Since iOS has a Universal Clipboard, the app can even read what’s being copied on other devices registered with the same iCloud account.
A LinkedIn spokesperson told ZDNet that the problem is just a software bug and not expected behavior. Erran Berger, VP Engineering of Consumer Products at LinkedIn, claims that “We don’t store or transmit the clipboard contents.”
Hi @DonCubed. Appreciate you raising this. We've traced this to a code path that only does an equality check between the clipboard contents and the currently typed content in a text box. We don't store or transmit the clipboard contents.
— 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. Once again, this reinforces that Apple is right to implement more privacy features in iOS.
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