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LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard on every keystroke

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

#331

Post by nottorp »

erikrothoff wrote: post #303
fingerlocks wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be higher, above all of the mobs teething for vengeance. It’s an innocuous comparison of text input to the pasteboard to prevent unwanted autocorrect insertions.[0] Probably the same code used by TikTok too. the code and and comments are here: [0] https://github.com/linkedin/Hakawai/pull/162/commits/c3f8958...

Seeing the mob mentality surrounding this is honestly scary. All the top voted comments have pretty much decided that this is used for nefarious purposes, with absolutely zero evidence. Same goes for TikTok and the DDG favicon saga from yesterday. Whatever happened to Occam’s (edit: Meant Hanlon's) razor?

I uninstalled the Linkedin app like 30 minutes after first trying it a couple years ago because it was bombarding me with useless notifications.

Then on the Microsoft purchase they redid their site in some crap javascript framework that keeps reloading elements and is 3x as slow as the previous version of the site.

I didn't even assume malice when i read the article title, i assumed incompetence.

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

#332

Post by pietrovismara »

justaguyhere wrote: post #24
_bxg1 wrote: 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.

Not a fan of any of the big tech companies, but Apple needs to be applauded for this feature. Can't wait to see how many such behavior is exposed by iOS 14

I would save my claps for people who are really working to improve the world, not for corporations who sometimes accidentally do the right thing while pursuing profit.

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

#333

Post by Traubenfuchs »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #119

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…

Half assed mobile sites for "big providers" is a growing issue. It can also be observed with reddit. Web technologies are at a point where apps often times don't increase the user experience for technical reasons, so companies deliberately castrate their online offers.

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

#334

Post by catalogia »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #300
catalogia wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Negligence from a trillion dollar corporation is a form of malice. They have the money to audit their products for quality and privacy issues. Instead they choose to not give a shit unless the media calls them out (and sometimes not even then.)

I feel like many of the people that has this opinion never worked at a big company in a big code base. It's probably a poorly coded feature from an intern that was left in because it had some value but operated in a way it shouldn't. Nobody is ever going to touch it until something like this happens. Then someone will go. "Oh shit we better fix this. Tell the product manager feature x is delayed so we can fix this sh…

> I feel like many of the people that has this opinion never worked at a big company in a big code base.

Well you're wrong about that.

> Nobody is ever going to touch it until something like this happens.

And that's the problem. A problem a company like Microsoft has the cash to avoid. They could hire more QA staff, but instead they've sacked tons.

Note that malice on the part of the corporation does not necessarily imply any individual at the corporation had malicious intent, although that can never be ruled out. Specifically, I am not claiming the intern who wrote the shitty code and forgot about it had malicious intent. Rather the organization itself is malicious, because it's a paperclip maximizer.

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

#335

Post by luckylion »

stunt wrote: post #324
NumberCruncher wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An example of this is in a library we have open sourced, and you can find the fix here This reads for me like: As an example of this I go to the shooting range every Friday, just for fun, as you can see it on this picture I published on FB, that's why I didn't shoot my neighbour. He may be right, but that's not an evidence. And we are talking about a company acting like a con man since ages.

> He may be right, but that's not an evidence. And we are talking about a company acting like a con man since ages. I don't have any reason to not believe their explanation. And I don't think my clipboard is useful to them for anything else. Many other apps are doing it as well and a few of them gave the same explanation. But, that doesn't mean that copying clipboard is a good idea. I don't like any app to copy my cl…

> I don't have any reason to not believe their explanation.

Why not? They've been engaging in very, very dark gray area things before.

> And I don't think my clipboard is useful to them for anything else.

Don't you ever copy paste anything mildly interesting, like email-addresses, phone numbers to add to your address book, form contents before submitting a form in case the site is terrible and resets the form on error etc? I'm sure they'd love to get their hand on that information, as it'll allow for data mining to better "understand you".

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

#336

Post by rkagerer »

lalos wrote: post #212
rkagerer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, once upon a time you trusted the code running on your device. In Chrome on Android, the flag you want is under Settings | Site Settings | Clipboard | Ask before allowing sites to read text and images from the clipboard , and I think it's on by default.

Funny how you are promoting Chrome and Android when I've known for a fact that Google Maps has done this since forever because when you open the app immediately if and only if it's an address it suggests whatever is on your clipboard as a destination. This means 1) there's code running somewhere grabbing the clipboard and deciding if it's an address (might ping home) 2) it has to copy the clipboard all the time to do…

I'm not promoting anything.

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

#337

Post by randomchars »

novok wrote: post #216
sneak wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now if only they would finally Sherlock Little Snitch for iOS; the amount of spyware embedded in almost every single app in the App Store is astounding. I make a point of knowing about this stuff and even I was flabbergasted the first few times I ran my iPhone via a proxy. Apple claims that you consented you this when you agreed to the App Store TOS.

There are so-so approximations of it, like the guardian vpn/firewall: https://guardianapp.com/

Unfortunately the approximations are not that great, requiring you to route all your network traffic through an unknown company.

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

#338

Post by fingerlocks »

Lio wrote: post #318
fingerlocks wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be higher, above all of the mobs teething for vengeance. It’s an innocuous comparison of text input to the pasteboard to prevent unwanted autocorrect insertions.[0] Probably the same code used by TikTok too. the code and and comments are here: [0] https://github.com/linkedin/Hakawai/pull/162/commits/c3f8958...

LinkedIn (Microsoft) is a company that previously used man-in-the-middle techniques to move people's private emails to its servers.[1] People no longer give them the benefit of that doubt because of the reputational damage these previous violations have caused. They should stop making "innocent" mistakes with other people's privacy and deal with this more professionally at the highest levels. If they don't people wil…

Sure, I get it. LinkedIn's email plugin thing was a security nightmare. But in this case, the code is right there!

Take a step back and look at the entire forest: The outrage is over an app accessing data specifically designed to be shared across applications. That's what Copy fundamentally means- make this thing globally available to all my programs. You can poll pbpaste/xsel in your terminal and generate a log of the clipboard buffer without any privileges. Does this mean an untrustworthy app could, in theory, snoop your plaintext password copied from a password manager? Sure, but that's a separate discussion.

Ask yourself, does it make sense to implement clipboard snooping in a way that polls the pasteboard on every keystroke while an input form remains in focus? No, that's weird, there's obvious bug stench. LinkedIn may be nefarious, but defaulting to instant outrage and lack of critical thinking is the real concern here.

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

#339

Post by queuep »

Apple has it's 'rigorous' app approval process, why is this not found in there? I've gotten rejected for all kinds of stuff. But I guess they are not doing any quality checks on the apps during this approval process?

Here I've justified the $100 yearly developer fees in that they have this rigorous checks, but apparently they're not really checking the apps?

This is apple failing us, nothing else.

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

#340

Post by holidaytrucksky »

randomchars wrote: post #337
novok wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so-so approximations of it, like the guardian vpn/firewall: https://guardianapp.com/

Unfortunately the approximations are not that great, requiring you to route all your network traffic through an unknown company.

There's also https://lockdownhq.com/ which should work on device. There really should be something like Screen Time directly integrated in the OS.
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