Popular iOS Apps Found To Be Capable Of Reading Your Clipboard Without Permission

Our clipboards on our phones and computers can sometimes store sensitive information. For example, some of us might copy credit card numbers, home addresses, or passwords onto them. This is why according to a blog post by developers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry is pretty alarming.

According to their findings, it seems that there are quite a number of popular and widely-used iOS apps out there that have access to your phone’s clipboard, and that they don’t need your permission in order to access it. “We have explored popular and top apps available on the App Store and observed their behavior using the standard Apple development tools. The results show that many apps frequently access the pasteboard and read its content without user consent, albeit only text-based data.”

The developers add that apps even have the ability to access non-text items on the clipboard, such as photos or even PDF documents, although in the case of the apps they found, these apps only chose to read text. Some of the apps named in their findings include news apps such as ABC News, CBS News, CNBC, along with games like Fruit Ninja, 8 Ball Pool, and even TikTok.

Exactly what these apps need access to your clipboard for is unclear, but as the developers point out, Apple definitely needs to do something about it.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Cellphones
Tags: Apps, iOS, Privacy