Reddit App Caught Reading User Clipboard Data by Apple iOS 14

Recently LinkedIn was caught reading User Clipboard data by Apple's iOS 14 new privacy notification feature. The same developer that spotted the LinkedIn app accessing his clipboard data, Don Morton, has also posted a video to Twitter showing the Reddit app exhibiting the same thing.

The iOS 14 new feature, which is yet to be released publicly, alerts the user when another app accesses text within the Apple clipboard. The paste notifications, have already caught TikTok doing the same.

A total of 53 apps were found accessing the clipboard data on startup, but TikTok - famous Chinese video-sharing social networking application was dipping into the data with every few keystrokes.

TikTok was very quick to respond, letting the world know that it didn't purposely receive or store any clipboard data and the functionality had been disabled in a June 27 app update.

A Reddit spokesperson told The Verge that "It reads clipboard for URLs and then suggests a post title based on the text contents of the URL." Reddit also mentioned that it neither stores nor sends the pasteboard contents and a fix to the app, removing the relevant code, will be released on July 14.

It is, perhaps, surprising that it took so long for these privacy-implicated behaviors to come to the fore with the beta release of iOS 14. Maybe now's the time for every application developer to check that they aren’t going to be making the privacy and tech news headlines tomorrow...