During the last few weeks there have been several occasions where famous and widely used mobile applications have been caught on spying on your device’s clipboard making it possible to capture sensitive information like your credit card information, passwords, personal information, your crypto wallet keys and so on.
TikTok is grabbing contents of the clipboard every 1-3 keystrokes as you can see in the tweet below from @jeremyburge.
Okay so TikTok is grabbing the contents of my clipboard every 1-3 keystrokes. iOS 14 is snitching on it with the new paste notification pic.twitter.com/OSXP43t5SZ
— Jeremy Burge (@jeremyburge) June 24, 2020
The company said the practice was part of an “anti-spam” feature and that it was being discontinued.
Then a similar issue came to light with the LinkedIn application.
LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard every keystroke. IOS 14 allows users to see each paste notification.
I’m on an IPad Pro and it’s copying from the clipboard of my MacBook Pro.
Tik tok just got called out for this exact reason. pic.twitter.com/l6NIT8ixEF
— Don 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 urspace.io (@DonCubed) July 2, 2020
Then came reddit…
UPDATE: Seems like Reddit is capturing the clipboard on each keystroke as well 😕
Seeing the notification come up just as much. pic.twitter.com/nzbElmRG2a
— Don 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 urspace.io (@DonCubed) July 2, 2020
Two iPhone developers, Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry, raised concerns about clipboard-copying behavior , noting that dozens of apps were engaged in the practice.
The privacy feature in iOS 14, which is still in a limited beta for developers, has revealed several apps engaging in clipboard copying in recent weeks.
Here is a list of the apps discovered so far that have been found guilty of accessing clipboard data:
- Call of Duty
- Fruit Ninja
- PUBG Mobile
- Accuweather
- AliExpress
- Google News
- Tik Tok
- Overstock
- Paetron
- ABC News
- Al Jazeera English
- CBC News
- CBS News
- CNBC
- Fox News
- News Break
- New York Times
- NPR
- ntv Nachrichten
- Reuters
- Russia Today
- Stern Nachrichten
- The Economist
- The Huffington Post
- The Wall Street Journal
- Vice News
- Hotels.com
- Hotel Tonight
- The Weather Network
- Sky Ticket
- TruCaller
- ToTalk
- Tok
- Viber
- Zoosk
- 8 Ball Pool
- Amaze!!!
- Bejeweled
- Block Puzzle
- Classic Bejeweled
- Classic Bejeweled HD
- Golfmasters
- Plants vs Zombies Heroes
- Bed Bath & Beyond
Be very careful with which applications you chose to install on your mobile devices. Until these apps push out updates that fix the clipboard issues try to avoid copying/pasting sensitive data like passwords, credit card numbers, etc