Thanks to the beta of iOS 14, a discovery highlights that 50 popular apps have been accessing the Clipboard for no reason.
As already seen in this post, iOS 14 has a new feature that alerts users when an application accesses the Clipboard. It allows maximum protection of confidentiality. Thanks to these warnings, confirmation has arrived that TikTok frequently accesses the Clipboard, to the point of forcing developers to eliminate this function with a special update. TikTok justified itself by saying that this access was made to identify potential spam and texts repeated continuously using copy / paste. Only, many experts explain that it was a facade justification.
Moreover, ArsTechnica has confirmed that more than 50 other applications frequently access the Clipboard. Add that they are capable of reading the content of text copied by the user on iOS.
The list of apps includes many popular titles, including social media Weibo and Zoosk, news apps like NPR and Fox News, games like Fruit Ninja and three different versions of Bejeweled, and other apps like Accuweather and Hotels.com. Of these, only 10% of the apps changed their behavior and disabled access to the Clipboard after the report was published.
Applications that access the Clipboard have the ability to extract data copied by the user. And in some cases, they may also contain passwords or other personal information not intended for use in these applications. In addition, with universal access to the Clipboard between Apple devices with the same iCloud account, the risk of leaking sensitive data is even greater, since the data copied to Mac can be read on iPhone.
“It’s very, very dangerous,” said one of the experts who led the study. “These applications read the notes and there is no reason to do so. An application that does not have a text field to enter text has no reason to read the text from the Clipboard ”.
In practice, it is true that the Clipboard function is very useful for copying and pasting texts between different applications. On the other hand, it does not make sense to activate this function in applications that do not even have a text field.
It is precisely for these reasons that iOS 14 introduces a new authorization that applications must request to access the Clipboard, in addition to the warnings that appear each time an application accesses notes.
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