I'm certain Apple knew in advance that a fair number of apps would trip this up and which ones were going to run into issues in advance. It's interesting that they went ahead and turned this on immediately without warning developers it was coming. Perhaps they wanted people to see what they were preventing.
iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes
341–350 of 613 posts
Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Or you can let access to your photos, but only let it see a walled garden of a few select photos. iOS 14 has this now. And any access to sensitive data always prompts you. And if you deny the request it sends empty data back to the app. Exactly like what you describe.
Yes but you could do this on Android since version 1 because it was open source. You could always modify the OS to spit out fake sensor data and appease apps that would otherwise not run if you didn't give them permissions.
My privacy shouldn't depend on Tim Cook's product management timeline.
Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lineage is a must on any phone I get. I reckon I haven't had a vendor distro on my phone since 2012
I was running Lineage on the tablet and I am usually very careful about what I allow. I have no idea how it got set to take over main screen at charging time. Btw, all these distributions (Lineage and Cynogenmod before that) don't benefit from automated updates. So that is another headache to remember to manually reflash/upgrade.
> don't benefit from automated updates
That varies by the ROM. Many do support automated OTA updates. (https://www.androidexplained.com/lineage-os-ota-update-locat...)
Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes
#344Earlier 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.
Apples walled garden approach is not necessary for any of this though (nor does it even make it easier). You can introduce sandboxing, fine grained permissions etc without locking devs and consumers into a controlled app store - these are OS features, not app store features.
In this respect, I see your point - a properly designed and secure OS, with a user and installer in "non admin" mode, should be able to do these things without locking the source of an app down to one location.
Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes
#345I'm certain Apple knew in advance that a fair number of apps would trip this up and which ones were going to run into issues in advance. It's interesting that they went ahead and turned this on immediately without warning developers it was coming. Perhaps they wanted people to see what they were preventing.
This is in a beta of iOS14. It's expected to have changes, sometimes breaking changes.
This is the beta process working exactly as it should.
Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes
#346Here'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…
[canarytokens](https://canarytokens.org/generate) are built for this, though I wouldn't use them for anything long-running
Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet no one else has
Android has. (Also I assume a pile of other, no longer available/not very successful mobile OSes, but the ecosystem is just Apple and Android at the moment).
Android has far too many apps that refuse to work unless you give certain permissions. One of my banking apps needs the camera permission to work at all. The permission prompt states it's to digitally cash checks, but it asks at startup and if you deny permission the app quits immediately. Most delivery apps won't work without giving GPS permission. The iOS app store does not allow this kinda bs.
Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
JavaScript can manipulate the contents of your clipboard without any interaction from the user. It's not just apps that can do this.
Manipulating the clipboard is not the problem, reading it is. AFAIK there is no way to read the clipboard from JavaScript without user interaction. If there is please post a repo. It used to be true but all that was fixed like 10 years ago.
I’m curious, how does Google Docs paste from the clipboard when I click the “paste” button from within the Google Docs UI?
Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not my point: I’m arguing that apps like TikTok and Facebook are big enough that they could convince non-technical users (who are either ignorant-of, or just don’t care about, app permissions and privacy) to switch to an unofficial app-store where they could list their app without it being denied approval by Apple or Google for unreasonable app permission prompts. ...but the fact that unofficial app-stores for…
>they could convince non-technical users to switch to an unofficial app-store They could , but they're absolutely not going to. Every barrier you put between and user and installing your app is a percentage of those installs that you're losing. Doubly so for "non technical" users, who can barely work the app store in the first place. No company of that size is going to lose that many downloads just to steal a few mor…
When it comes to a mainstream app like Facebook or TikTok that already has network effects and a critical mass of users, people will put up with significant efforts to alleviate their fear of missing out, including sideloading the app.
Re: iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
By and large this is true. However, the android Citibank mobile app refuses to do anything useful if you don't give it access to your entire file system upfront. I don't think Apple would allow that kind of permissions abuse, but apparently Google does.
> However, the android Citibank mobile app refuses to do anything useful if you don't give it access to your entire file system upfront. Considering Citi’s corporate culture, I’d attribute this to incompetence rather than malice or a desire to spy on users. I’ll bet they’re using a third-party anti-spyware library to examine the Android FS for keyloggers/etc to protect their users’ security. It’s well-intentioned, bu…
To the consumer it doesn't really matter if it's malice or ineptitude or laziness. Fact is Apple will remove your app if you try something like that, but it is not uncommon to encounter this on Android.