LinkedIn Caught Spying On iOS Users Through Clipboard

Microsoft-owned professional networking site LinkedIn has been found out for snooping on clipboard data for iOS devices. It was discovered that the app copies content with every keystroke. This comes just days after Chinese social media app TikTok was also found to be snooping on users’ clipboards.

This snooping was discovered thanks to an iOS 14 beta feature that alerts users when an app accesses the clipboard. LinkedIn has acknowledged the issue and made it known that a fix is on its way. The developer who discovered this fault, @DonCubed on Twitter discovered that the app was copying content from the clipboard of his MacBook Pro and he could see all notifications of it being copied on his iPad Pro.

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

— d (@m0nald) July 2, 2020

Apple’s ecosystem uses a Universal Clipboard feature that lets users copy certain content from one Apple device to another. Users need to enable this feature on all their Apple devices if they want to have the Universal Clipboard, as this feature can alert users when their clipboard is accessed on other iOS devices.

Erran Berger, VP Engineering consumer products at LinkedIn, acknowledged this occurrence in a reply to @DonCubed’s tweet, saying that this behaviour was as a result of an equality check between the clipboard contents and the currently typed content. He also stated that the clipboard data is not stored or sent anywhere, and a fix was already on the way.

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