Now I'm going to tell you something else that will really make your blood boil: If you use a Mac, your iPhone has access to your Mac's clipboard by default.Īnd this means, by extension, the apps installed on your iPhone also have access to things you copy to your Mac's clipboard.

Here's how: You can read the full disclosure document by the security researchers who discovered this exploit here. Seems to be bugging out and showing with every keystroke in TikTok /aFKNfZnpyb- Jeremy Burge June 24, 2020Īpps can even use this clipboard exploit to get your location data without you ever granting them permission. IOS 14 beta has a banner to confirm when you paste from another device (eg copy on a Mac and paste on iPhone) Here's an example of this discovered when Apple started showing clipboard notifications in the iOS 14 beta: Some apps, like TikTok, use this clipboard exploit even while running in the background to steal every single character you type into any app. Here's an insane supercut of several well-known apps stealing the contents of your clipboard (which now triggers a notification in the newest version of iOS.) This was never an issue for Apple until privacy advocates started raising awareness of this earlier this week. And they are just now taking steps to restrict apps' access to your clipboard, and to notify you when an app accesses the contents of your clipboard. There's no way to know for sure what they are using your clipboard data for.Īpple has known about this for a long time. Private messages to your friends and family.Īll of these things are being stolen from you and sent to the data centers of multinational corporations, who will use it to figure out what ads to show you so they can make more money.Īnd that is just the best case scenario. Think about all the things you copy to your clipboard.

These apps often record the contents of your clipboard several times a minute, and send them to their company servers to store for eternity. If you are an iPhone user, everything you have copied to your clipboard on your iPhone can be secretly accessed by various apps. I'm about to tell you something that will shock you, and probably make you very angry.

Clear clipboard mac