LinkedIn promises to stop spying on your iPhone clipboard

We reported a week ago that changes to iOS14 have revealed a number of apps have been copying your clipboard without any prompt from the user, including apps such as famously TikTok, but also Microsoft Teams.

It turns out Linkedin was another app which was taking part in the practice, as demonstrated by Don from Urspace.

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

When confronted by the issue Erran Berger, VP Engineering of Consumer Products at LinkedIn claimed the issue was a bug.

“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,” Berger wrote on Twitter.

“We don’t store or transmit the clipboard contents. We will follow up once the fix is live in our app,” he added.

The practice of copying your clipboard has been found to be very widespread, but so far no company has admitted to doing anything in particular with the data they scrounge up. However with clipboard synchronization on a number of platforms (e.g. the Your Phone app) your clipboard should probably be seen as a sensitive data source which needs a bit more attention than we have been giving it over the years.

Via ZDNet, the Verge.