Can someone answer why iOS even allows the ability to read the clipboard buffer in the first place? Just seems like poor privacy and security design.
TikTok app to stop accessing user clipboards after being caught in the act
121–130 of 160 posts
Re: TikTok app to stop accessing user clipboards after being caught in the act
#122Can someone answer why iOS even allows the ability to read the clipboard buffer in the first place? Just seems like poor privacy and security design.
so that if you switch from app A to app B, it can check your clipboard buffer for if you have a URL pasted into it and load that URL in the context of the app
example: if you copied twitter://foo/tweet/bar or https://twitter.com/foo/tweet/bar, it checks your clipboard and loads that tweet instantly
at least that's what i read over on reddit about this on r/apple
Re: TikTok app to stop accessing user clipboards after being caught in the act
#123Can someone answer why iOS even allows the ability to read the clipboard buffer in the first place? Just seems like poor privacy and security design.
I know, right?
It's not super hard to imagine a parallel universe where any software can copy to the clipboard but only the OS, upon user request, can paste back out of it. And yet here we are wallowing in filth. Why, because people have never heard of a callback before?
Let the application include a "paste" handler function, and then all clipboard exfiltration must be initiated by the user at the OS UI layer. Simple. Safe.
Re: TikTok app to stop accessing user clipboards after being caught in the act
#124Can someone answer why iOS even allows the ability to read the clipboard buffer in the first place? Just seems like poor privacy and security design.
so that if you switch from app A to app B, it can check your clipboard buffer for if you have a URL pasted into it and load that URL in the context of the app example: if you copied twitter://foo/tweet/bar or https://twitter.com/foo/tweet/bar , it checks your clipboard and loads that tweet instantly at least that's what i read over on reddit about this on r/apple
Except that letting apps randomly pull from the clipboard, where you might have copied passwords, bank account numbers, or any other sensitive information, is such an obviously unsafe idea that the person who suggested it should have been immediately sent to special privacy consciousness training.
For what? To save one "send to app" or "paste"?
At least reserve that functionality exclusively for the operating system on the grounds of "TRUST YOU? HAHAHAHAHA".
Re: TikTok app to stop accessing user clipboards after being caught in the act
#125Can someone answer why iOS even allows the ability to read the clipboard buffer in the first place? Just seems like poor privacy and security design.
I copy my password from my password manager and paste it into a different app. I can copy notes from OneNote and paste it into my email and there are many other use cases i can think of. With iOS 14 Apple is letting the user know that some app is accessing your clipboard.
Re: TikTok app to stop accessing user clipboards after being caught in the act
#126Can someone answer why iOS even allows the ability to read the clipboard buffer in the first place? Just seems like poor privacy and security design.
I copy my password from my password manager and paste it into a different app. I can copy notes from OneNote and paste it into my email and there are many other use cases i can think of. With iOS 14 Apple is letting the user know that some app is accessing your clipboard.
All of your examples are things initiated directly by the user. There's no reason that preserving user-initiated "paste" needs to mean letting an app take what it wants.
Re: TikTok app to stop accessing user clipboards after being caught in the act
#127The security implications of allowing communications on a platform that is subject to the absolute control of a foreign government, seems like a very very bad idea. That can be a lesson learned the easy way or the hard way.
Well, I'm more concerned about my platform being subject to the control of my own government. Because I don't care very much about foreign governments given I happen to be a western citizen that has nothing to do with that countries. But what about ours, do you think our government is better than theirs? For how long?
Re: TikTok app to stop accessing user clipboards after being caught in the act
#128The security implications of allowing communications on a platform that is subject to the absolute control of a foreign government, seems like a very very bad idea. That can be a lesson learned the easy way or the hard way.
I honestly think we give Chinese apps too much equal footing. In about 5-8 years, when China has insane surveillance network around the world (they already have), this comment is going to sound the most sensible thing to do - blanket ban any application developed and served by the CCP or similar government. People teeter-totter about righteousness and freedom of choice, but IMO we need to stop feeding the CCP with mo…
> The west offered two-way street which China declined to walk on.
What?
Re: TikTok app to stop accessing user clipboards after being caught in the act
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
if you accept the premise that tiktok is collecting data for the chinese government, then anyone using the app would indeed be an asset
I cannot begin to imagine how my adolescenct daughter could be of any possible use to the middle kingdom. Remotely, via a dance app.
Incidental and unintended data leakage.
TikTok is a virally popular video app used globally by a generation of adolescence that have normalized the behavior of recording inane happenings in their life multiple times a day, with an undeveloped sense of propriety and limited ability to fully comprehend the significance of their actions.
Not that I have much of an opinion on TikTok's usage as an intelligence gathering source, I certainly appreciate its potential as one.
My daughters are constantly taking videos all over the place, with little regard to what is in the video beyond themselves. Even though they've been hounded on what is and isn't appropriate to capture in a video, I'm sure they have an under-developed sense of security/concern in that regard, particularly for "private" or deleted videos.
Access to the full corpus of video data uploaded to Tiktok would be a gold mine, least of which would actually be my adolescent daughters. Unrelated conversations picked up in the background, where/when they took the video, compromising/confidential artifacts exposed incidentally in the background, facial recognition on individuals in the video (whether the subject of the video or otherwise), etc. There are an immeasurable number of ways such a rich data source could be mined for signal intelligence.
Note that TikTok is far from the only app that fits this definition. There are plenty of other platforms that create a similarly useful corpus of video data. But anecdotally from my kids and their friends, TikTok is the flavor of the moment. Especially so for those young enough for the above concerns (or lack thereof) to be most valid.
Re: TikTok app to stop accessing user clipboards after being caught in the act
#130Most of the anti-TikTok comments that have emerged recently are beyond hysterical. We are arguing about China using this app as a primary nexus of intelligence gathering, in a world where they already have the US government’s entire OPM database?[1] A lot of apps are doing the stupid clipboard detection thing. As others have commented, there’s reasons for this that range from spam detection to link shortening. It’s l…
When I was younger I would laugh at those ridiculous "forwards from grandma" about, like, secret Satanic messages embedded in Super Mario. Every kid knew these were nonsense; we just assumed it was a consequence of that generation growing up without technology.
I was wrong. Every generation is equally prone to hysteria. We learn nothing.