181–190 of 613 posts
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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.
Android is a spyware operating system filled with first party spyware apps developed by Google.
Using fiddler I briefly looked and didn't see tiktok sending my clipboard contents anywhere. Edit: However, tiktok is one of the chattiest apps I've looked at. They have a huge number of tracking/logging/collection endpoints constantly slurping data in the background. See my hosts list which aims to block this: https://github.com/llacb47/mischosts/blob/master/tiktok-host...
That way it wouldn't be possible for users to block individual hosts to prevent tracking. I guess it's not worth the effort though because laypeople won't care either way?
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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.
No, you're really only transferring the trust onto Apple.
It seems like an intractable problem but I think we still have a few tricks up our sleeves. For one thing, we can look at what public companies report in their quarterly earnings and what major business decisions they make. For Apple, the vast majority of their revenue comes from hardware and services. A very, very tiny amount of their revenue comes from advertising.
Compare that with Google and Facebook. These companies make nearly all of their revenue from advertising. Why is this distinction important? Because advertising is all about data collection. Hardware sales? Much less so.
So when I need to figure out whether I should trust Apple vs trusting Google, I look at where their incentives are and how much they align with my own. Google's incentive is to collect as much of my data as possible and monetize it while keeping me engaged with search and YouTube. Apple's incentive, on the other hand, is to sell me new hardware and get me to subscribe to their services.
It seems pretty clear to me that Apple has far less incentive to snoop on my personal data and abuse my privacy than Google does, so I deem them more trustworthy. Is this a complete picture? Probably not. But I think it's still a valuable one.
I use bitwarden as my password manager. Out of paranoia, I have been logging into Bitwarden only while an empty tab is open in case some random website is able to access my keystrokes while I use the plugin. I am a web developer, but I wasn't actually able to find information about whether this is a real risk or not last year when I began doing it. Can anybody clarify?
Chrome implements a "clipboard-read" permission that can be requested by calling navigator.clipboard.read(). When a page calls that it will display a permission request dialog (like those asking for permission to show notifications on seemingly every single news web page). A little clipboard icon will also appear in the nav bar showing the status of the permission (visible after a read attempt is made during that visit)
Firefox is apparently on track as well, although for now the clipboard.read function is not implemented for pages and can only be called by extensions. I'm not sure what the permission dialog for extensions is like.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Clipboard_A...
So... it may be safe. But it is a work in progress and each browser is different. I've only checked the most well-documented method for reading the clipboard... maybe there is some other half-implemented feature or event listener that happens to leak some clipboard data...
Here's a test you should run. Create a bitly account if you don't have one and login and create a bitly link for anything, it doesn't matter what it is. Copy that bitly link to your clipboard and repeat what you're doing in that video. Monitor the bitly link for clicks. Better still do it on a website you control with a unique URL that won't get indexed by a search engine and monitor the web server log files for hits…
I wonder if Apple is playing 4D chess here though. As people learn about this, they will become outraged and care more about privacy. This in turn benefits Apple since that's their marketing stance.
I wish they just cut the bullshit and fixed these holes though, they've been around for years. It's really depressing to see Apple's fantastic security work in other parts of the stack be completely and utterly compromised by OS design decisions like this.
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> I've never seen one of these app-specific paste widgets IIRC having an address (or address-looking string) in your clipboard will cause it to show up as the first result on the search screen in Google Maps.
So google also sends the contents of my clipboard to their servers when I use their app? Wonderful.
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Why do you have to eventually trust someone?
Because you would need to write and/or audit your entire technology toolchain — software, build tools, operating systems, hardware, etc — which isn't feasible for anyone.
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not a single person, but the sum of all people looking at the different parts. that's how open source works.
And thus you would need to trust those people.
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It’s unbelievable that Apple would leave this security hole wide open for so long. Notifying the user is not enough.
I would love to know what OS you're using that requires permissions for foreground app access to the system clipboard.
WE as society cannot allow this impunity that is occurring by a very well powerful corporation, a nation-state sponsored Corporation, no less. Where does it end? Why do we allow this to occur? Why do members of our own society not know the perils of using this technology?