TikTok and other apps are accessing your mobile clipboard. Why?
posted Sunday Jun 28, 2020 by Scott Ertz
One of the new features of iOS 14 is a more honed control over the live permissions that apps receive. Among the new notifications is an alert when an app accesses your clipboard data. This has created an uproar in the Apple user community as more and more apps are discovered to be accessing the clipboard, seemingly without need. Some apps have a legitimate use for accessing the clipboard, some do it for convenience purposes, and others do it for no real reason at all. So far, 54 high profile apps are in question.
For some apps, clipboard data makes sense. An app like TrueCaller accessing the clipboard to see if you have a phone number stored can make it easier for you to check the history of that phone number. But, it could be just as easy to paste the phone number into a textbox and TrueCaller can continue to just be what it is. Other apps, like New York Times and Wall Street Journal have no reason to access the clipboard except to snoop on that content.
The original concern, and possibly the most glaring, is the controversial app TikTok. There are a number of reasons why there is great concern over the app's behavior. It is a Chinese app with strong ties to the Chinese government. It has been actively used to censor content and regularly discriminates against people the Chinese government disagrees with, such as the LGBT community. Giving the Chinese government access to additional content on your device could create a privacy issue unlike any other.
The company has said that they have already removed the clipboard access, but users are reporting that the app is still throwing notifications about clipboard access. For a platform that is so well-known for privacy violations, this is not surprising.
