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iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes

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Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes

#81

Post by RandomBacon »

dheera wrote: post #52
alfalfasprout wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People love to hate on Apple but the fact is, they continue to release features to better showcase or restrict developers that abuse your privacy. The "walled garden" also ensures they apply a ton of checks to apps to better restrict abuses. Sometimes it's overly sensitive and bad things happen, but in general it's awesome that over time it becomes harder and harder to get away with apps blatantly spying on you.

I'm probably going to get downvoted to hell for saying this (again) but this still doesn't solve the problem of whether Apple themselves are abusing your privacy. Also, the closed-source OS means it's impossible to see what things are doing under the hood, or modify the behavior of the OS itself to be more privacy friendly. For example, on Apple if you aren't happy with an app snooping on your IMU data, you're out of…

> I'm probably going to get downvoted to hell

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Don't bring it up next time. Reverse psychology (in an attempt to not get downvotes) doesn't work here, it just pisses people off (and is against the rules to complain about), so you WILL receive downvotes for mentioning it.

Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes

#82

Post by _bxg1 »

pininja wrote: post #45
_bxg1 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are apps that have different behavior whether or not there is text in the clipboard (e.g. enabling a "paste" button) People keep saying this but I've never seen one of these app-specific paste widgets. And even if I did, I wouldn't miss it in the slightest for the sake of not allowing every app to be reading my clipboard at all times . It's inexcusable to me that there isn't a permissions prompt for this. Two…

Is the “Link you copied” feature in new tab of iOS google chrome one of these? As well as the “Address you copied” iOS Google Maps search field feature?

I don't use any Google apps so I don't know, but even if I did, it's such a minuscule amount of effort that's being saved by having a custom prompt when the generic path is so easy.

Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes

#83

Post by spaetzleesser »

I think in general operating systems shouldn’t just ask the user for permissions when an app wants to do something. But they also should provide a log about when, to what extent and how often apps are using that permission. For example when I give an app permission to read message I still have no clue how often the app does it.

Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes

#84

Post by patrickyeon »

shawnz wrote: post #77
alfalfasprout wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People love to hate on Apple but the fact is, they continue to release features to better showcase or restrict developers that abuse your privacy. The "walled garden" also ensures they apply a ton of checks to apps to better restrict abuses. Sometimes it's overly sensitive and bad things happen, but in general it's awesome that over time it becomes harder and harder to get away with apps blatantly spying on you.

Android similarly has been continually improving the privacy/permissions model of the OS when it comes to third party apps. I am not sure that Apple has any obvious advantage in that department specifically.

I've only ever been an Android user, but for a while I was paying a lot of attention to iOS too. It seems to me like they've been back and forthing, as one side figures out some improvements, the other side more-or-less re-implements them on their next release with their own unrelated improvements.

Seems like a good thing, really.

Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes

#85

Post by spaetzleesser »

kstrauser wrote: post #54

iOS already prompts for other things like "app Foo would like to know your location: Never, Only when open, Always". Users are use to this. I'd love a popup like: "TikTok wants to see what you've copied into your clipboard: Never, Once, Always, Uninstall that spyware". Then I could make informed decisions, like sure, my package tracker can see if there's a FedEx URL in my clipboard. I'm OK with that. There's literall…

There should also be a log “App foo has used your location at these times: }

Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes

#86

Post by binarycrusader »

tempestn wrote: post #31
speedyapoc wrote: post #18

I know there are a few apps which will check the clipboard in order to provide functionality to the user. For example, some shipping apps will check the clipboard to see if the user has a copied tracking code and if so, ask the user if they want to track their copied code. Not sure if TikTok does something similar, but there are certainly innocent reasons for checking the clipboard.

You'd think if the user knew to copy a tracking code into their clipboard, they could also paste it into the appropriate field without the app needing to extract it for them. Edit: fair responses, all. You've convinced me.

Google/Apple maps does this too; if you've copied an address and then open them it offers you the copied address as a suggestion (usually with a clipboard icon) or as an option to navigate to instead of having to copy/paste manually.

Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes

#87

Post by RandallBrown »

vxNsr wrote: post #22

Appears that a lot of third party apps are just using an older api that forces this notification to show. a lot less nefarious than it originally appears. Seems that iOS14 offers a specific new API to check if there's something on the clipboard without actually seeing it which is what all these apps are trying to do.

The API to check if the clipboard has contents has existed since iOS 10.

> Starting in iOS 10, the UIPasteboard class provides properties for directly checking whether specific data types are present on a pasteboard, described in Checking for Data Types on a Pasteboard. Use these properties, rather than attempting to read pasteboard data, to avoid causing the system to needlessly attempt to fetch data before it is needed or when the data might not be present.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uipasteboard

Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes

#88

Post by binarycrusader »

_bxg1 wrote: post #82
pininja wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the “Link you copied” feature in new tab of iOS google chrome one of these? As well as the “Address you copied” iOS Google Maps search field feature?

I don't use any Google apps so I don't know, but even if I did, it's such a minuscule amount of effort that's being saved by having a custom prompt when the generic path is so easy.

It's tricky; little things like this may not seem like much, but in aggregate they can be quite frustrating to users. Personally, this is something I do often enough that it noticeably reduces friction for me so I live with it because it's very convenient.

However, it seems like there should still be a way to provide nearly as much convenience to users while still protecting their privacy.

Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes

#89

Post by dang »

radomysisky wrote: post #37
grecy wrote: post #9

Fairly impressive if true - they must have already gobbled up tens of millions of passwords and other sensitive data that users had no idea was being stolen from their clipboard.

To the coffers of the CCP.

Since you're obviously using this site primarily for ideological battle, and that's against the rules here, we've banned the account.

No, not because we're communists. Rather, this is an existential issue for HN: if we want to have a forum for curious conversation, we have to limit the amount of damage people can inflict on it in this way.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes

#90

Post by nojito »

kstrauser wrote: post #54

iOS already prompts for other things like "app Foo would like to know your location: Never, Only when open, Always". Users are use to this. I'd love a popup like: "TikTok wants to see what you've copied into your clipboard: Never, Once, Always, Uninstall that spyware". Then I could make informed decisions, like sure, my package tracker can see if there's a FedEx URL in my clipboard. I'm OK with that. There's literall…

Apple also allows you to share relative location.

A 10 square mile box.

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