iOS clipboard snooping still rampant in many popular apps, a report by Ars Techina found clipboard snooping in 54 of 56 apps studied.
Malcolm Owen for AppleInsider:
The clipboard-snooping antics of apps isn’t limited to just TikTok, as it has been discovered over 50 apps that were found to be accessing data from the iOS clipboard in March were continuing the practice months later.
As part of the new features arriving in iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 this fall, Apple included a number of measures designed to help increase the privacy of user data. One of those features will alert users to whenever an app attempts to access the clipboard, in order to educate users of the types of apps that can potentially access their data.
While TikTok is the highest-profile app that was caught out back in March, other apps found to be doing the same thing at the time are continuing the practice. In a report by Ars Technica, 54 from a collection of 56 found by researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry were still reading the clipboard.
The list of apps includes many popular titles, including social apps like Weibo and Zoosk, news apps including NPR and Fox News, games such as Fruit Ninja and three different versions of Bejeweled, and others such as Accuweather and Hotels.com.
MacDailyNews Take: Years ago, on the Mac, we developed the habit of copying a blank space to the clipboard after using it for a URL, password, or whatever*. Obviously, we should be doing similar on iOS and iPadOS. A simple app that automatically clears the clipboard of any device with a clipboard after a set period of time and/or gives us a simple button to clear the clipboard would do the job!
We do use the free CopyClip to manage our Mac Clipboards, so that we can have a Clipboard history (multiple clipboards and more control of them). More info via Apple’s Mac App Store here.
If anyone has a recommendation for a good iOS/iPadOS Clipboard manager app, please let us know!
Why are clipboard snooping Apps allowed into the App store?
Interesting MDN’s rather calm take on this. If this happened on Android the MDN take would be very different. As L Ron Hubbard said why are these apps allowed on the app store.
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