Reddit Will Stop Copying Your Clipboard In Upcoming iOS Update

Apple loves touting the privacy of their products, and iOS 14 actually does a pretty good job of that by notifying users whenever an app accesses the clipboard on their devices. For those unfamiliar, the clipboard is basically where whenever you copy a text (or image or file) is stored temporarily.

Users have been discovering that quite a number of apps have actually been accessing their clipboards without their knowledge following the installation of the iOS 14 beta, and it seems that Reddit was found to be one of the offending apps. According to users, it seems that they have been receiving alerts pretty much non-stop with every keystroke they make while using the app.

Reddit has since released a statement to The Verge in which they explain what their intention was, but also note that they will be removing the feature in an upcoming update to the app. “We tracked this down to a codepath in the post composer that checks for URLs in the pasteboard and then suggests a post title based on the text contents of the URL. We do not store or send the pasteboard contents. We removed this code and are releasing the fix on July 14th.”

https://twitter.com/DonCubed/status/1278800136408186881

To be fair, a lot of apps that were found to be doing this were doing it for non-nefarious/malicious reasons, but at the same time, the fact that it was done without the user’s knowledge made it feel somewhat questionable.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Cellphones, General
Tags: Apps, iOS, ios 14, Privacy, reddit