Live data from Hacker News

LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard on every keystroke

twitter.com

191–200 of 380 posts

Re: LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard on every keystroke

#191
post #106

Very not cool. I am a medium LinkedIn user, but now it is going to be limited strictly to a PC browser, where I have some control. I just uninstalled it from my cell. I got caught in the siren song of convenience. Now how many other apps do this.

If someone steals your wallet, my advice is don’t let them drive you to the airport.

But the thing is you need to get to the airport and there's no other way without missing your plane and forfeiting money paid for your ticket. Now what?

That's where we are with the market power of the big players. Google, facebook, apple, linkedin etc. Use the competition to linkedin in this space? You lose. The end.

The way we have always dealt with market power abuse in the past is via a combination of breaking up dominant players and regulation. The longer this wild abuse of market power goes on the more likely that this will be done in a bad way with pitchforks rather than a sensible, measured, outcome driven way carefully weighing the competing intrests to get what is best for the wider population in the medium and long term.

Also the fact this is legal at all is another case of everyone in law making, courts and enforcement having their brains fall out of their ears as soon as the words "using computers" are uttered. Do the exact same thing in any business where a computer is not used to do that thing and you are going to jail. It's break and enter. But "using a computer" so it's fine with the laws all no longer applicable.

Re: LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard on every keystroke

#192
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually really like how Apple implemented this though. If apps aren't doing something very clearly nefarious, it's not annoying at all.

It's not necessarily nefarious though. https://twitter.com/twolivesleft/status/1275776460918157315

Ah, thanks, that's a case I didn't think of. And a pretty good reason to keep this out of a point release!

Re: LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard on every keystroke

#193
post #61
post #5

Guess I'm never copying and pasting anything sensitive on my phone ever again. Still don't understand why clipboard-sniffing isn't behind a permissions flag.

> Still don't understand why clipboard-sniffing isn't behind a permissions flag. Screw permissions flags. Clipboard-sniffing is never justified. Moving data out of the clipboard should only ever happen by direct user request via the OS interaction layer.

And what, exactly, constitutes "direct user request" that both 1) does not break common programming techniques (e.g. an application rolling its own GUI, or implementing its own modes/keybindings) and 2) is not trivially spoofable by the enterprising developer?

I understand the outrage over apps abusing their access to the clipboard but what I don't understand is the people acting as though the OSes they use on the daily don't have the exact same "flaw".

Re: LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard on every keystroke

#194
post #15

Does this recurring problem suggest a missing API?

Make clipboard behave like a channel[+], like GNOME native apps do, additionally require a standard paste command to paste, then this clipboard attack will be impossible to conduct. [+]:A sample pipe might be a good analogy for this behaviour. You cut or copy the input, send through the sample pipe, and the receiving end unpacks, receiving itself makes the sample disappear for further use. Multiple samples could be s…

GNOME is based on X11, which _very_ much grants programmatic access to the clipboard to pretty much any application that asks.

Seriously, has anyone complaining about this actually paid any attention to how clipboards work on their OSes before this?

Re: LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard on every keystroke

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can copy-paste styled text, images, and other kinds of non-plaintext data, so it couldn't be implemented quite that simply.

Agreed, but that still doesn't mean that and app should ever have the query the contents of the clipboard. The OS could send a message to the app with the contents of the clipboard when the user presses CTRL-V.

How, precisely, do you propose this would work with raw keyboard modes? Or graphical context menus?

The discussion around this is so strange and weirdly nontechnical to me.

Re: LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard on every keystroke

#196

LinkedIn has a history of acting like a cretin: multiple data breaches, dark patterns where they don't fix their buggy mobile site and just put up a disclaimer "problems with the mobile site - download our app" (just so that they can harvest a wider range of data). I managed many marketing campaigns on Linkedin over the years and spent thousands each month on the platform as a corporate user. If you think that paying…

I mean I've definitely been contacted by FAANG companies out of no where and got interviews through that.

Same.

Re: LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard on every keystroke

#197
post #104

It’s interesting that GNU/Linux apps don’t seem to have this problem even though there’s limited rather than total curation. It’s almost like letting the community maintain and control the software results in better user experience.

They do have this _problem_, if you're at all aware of how X11 works.

In fact, Linux literally does not have a built-in system clipboard.

Re: LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard on every keystroke

#198

You have to imagine the Apple engineers who implemented this new clipboard notification knew this shitstorm was coming.

I'm guessing that's part of the reason they didn't implement a clipboard permission. It would probably have broken a TON of stuff in weird ways. I expect to see an actual clipboard permission at some point.

Wait what, they show the pop-up, but there is no permission toggle for access?

Re: LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard on every keystroke

#199
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, I won't use their phone app, they're way too slimy to live there. They conveniently forget your mail settings periodically, too, forcing you to opt-out of various garbage again, or to just trash all the mail. They're at least as scummy as FB, if not worse. My (related) new rule: if your site demands a phone number for an account, I will not create an account on your site.

I’m not a fan of giving phone numbers out either. When I have to I give one to sites I hold suspect I use a number from the safe fictitious range allowed for use on TV and in movies. It’s like example.org but for phone numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number)

I used to do something similar when a site I visited demanded an email address. I just used "mm@disney.com" (Mickey Mouse). Eventually, sites started verifying the given email address so that didn't work anymore. Now I just have a "burner" email address for such cases.

Re: LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard on every keystroke

#200

LinkedIn has a history of acting like a cretin: multiple data breaches, dark patterns where they don't fix their buggy mobile site and just put up a disclaimer "problems with the mobile site - download our app" (just so that they can harvest a wider range of data). I managed many marketing campaigns on Linkedin over the years and spent thousands each month on the platform as a corporate user. If you think that paying…

I've recently found that they're really pushing people toward the paid tier. I connected with someone a few weeks ago, and when I look at his contacts, I can only see people who are contacts to him AND other contacts of mine.

Why won't LinkedIn let me see contacts that are 2nd-degree contacts via only him? I have no idea. But this mentor specifically asked me to go through his contacts and look for people I'd like to be introduced to, and I literally can't see a single new person as a result of connecting to him.

Post reply on HN