Apple dropped the ball. Apps should never have been allowed to access the clipboard without the users permission.
Apple then made excuses as it being ‘intended behavior’.
That said, Apps frequently do things they’re not supposed to like collect location data, or send information unencrypted.
I install as few apps as possible and use websites instead. Location services are disabled unless needed for a trusted app (banking).
Every App in this list is permanently banned. I don’t care if it’s 50 years from now, they will NEVER be installed on one of my devices.
There are no accidents only business models. They will violate users privacy again. Guaranteed! I’ve stopped counting how many times Facebook had an oops. Their ban extends to their website...
It is intended behaviour because Apple needs to dip into the clipboard to allow the contents to be shared by your devices for the Universal Clipboard. So the first thing you need to do is switch off the universal clipboard.
There are at least 30 clipboard managers on the app store, which folk use for multi-level copying and pasting. They also need to access the clipboard, so make sure you don't install any of those.
And then there's 1Password that, for reasons of security, clears passwords copied onto the clipboard after a certain amount of time. So that means you can't use 1Password either.
All of these apps, and hundreds more rely on this intended behaviour. This is why Apple has added an alert, rather than just restricting access altogether.
@Rayz2016 yes, this is an extremely complex problem I’m guessing Apple has known about for a long time. I have a feeling this is a stop gap until they are able to design a proper clipboard manager. If I were a developer of one of the current apps I would be very nervous at WWDC 2021.
Ascribing some sinister intent is paranoid. Some programmer probably thought it was a good idea to enable some capability. And the clipboard API is public allowed since forever on iOS. As long as the data is simply being checked, then its sort of absurd to assume that LinkedIn are somehow 'stealing' clipboard content for nefarious purposes. There are so many better ways to get data than some random clipboard text. No one ever thinks about this on the desktop like MacOS and Windows. Applications are always checking the clipboard for pasteable content.
I can’t think of any valid reason to check the clipboard at all. Checking for pastable content? Wait until they paste.
Ascribing some sinister intent is paranoid. Some programmer probably thought it was a good idea to enable some capability. And the clipboard API is public allowed since forever on iOS. As long as the data is simply being checked, then its sort of absurd to assume that LinkedIn are somehow 'stealing' clipboard content for nefarious purposes. There are so many better ways to get data than some random clipboard text. No one ever thinks about this on the desktop like MacOS and Windows. Applications are always checking the clipboard for pasteable content.
I can’t think of any valid reason to check the clipboard at all. Checking for pastable content? Wait until they paste.
This means you haven’t thought things through with how applications work.
if you have copy/paste support in your application, you’ll want to enable a GUI status to tell the user when that’s possible. If nothing is currently a selected object, the Copy menu item, button, whatever, is shown as disabled until something is selected by the user.
By contrast, whatever exists for the user (button, menu, etc.) can’t reflect an accurate state of whether it is possible to paste without taking 2 things into account:
1. Something is on the clipboard. If there is only ever one application visible on the screen, and it can only interact within itself, this can be done entirely locally if there is never a transition away from the application’s window. This assumes no support for other background applications pasting something,
2. The type of data on the clipboard: if you have a strictly text-based application that has no graphics support whatsoever, no intelligent conversion exists from a picture on the clipboard into raw text, as one example. Clipboards in GUI-supporting OSes support more than one type of data on the clipboard at a time, but it may not have a format that makes sense for different apps, so it’s not enough to know if data is available for pasting, it’s also required to know if it makes any sense in the current context.
Thus, it makes sense to check if there’s data on the clipboard when transitioning to being a visible foreground app, or if it is also displayed with another application also displayed, but if it is the only foreground app and there’s no reason to expect a background app to paste to the clipboard to exchange data, then constantly checking the clipboard makes no sense, but doing it each time the application has been made visible to the user makes perfect sense.
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It is intended behaviour because Apple needs to dip into the clipboard to allow the contents to be shared by your devices for the Universal Clipboard. So the first thing you need to do is switch off the universal clipboard.
There are at least 30 clipboard managers on the app store, which folk use for multi-level copying and pasting. They also need to access the clipboard, so make sure you don't install any of those.
And then there's 1Password that, for reasons of security, clears passwords copied onto the clipboard after a certain amount of time. So that means you can't use 1Password either.
All of these apps, and hundreds more rely on this intended behaviour. This is why Apple has added an alert, rather than just restricting access altogether.
Also, who uses Linkedin, much less has a need for their app???
if you have copy/paste support in your application, you’ll want to enable a GUI status to tell the user when that’s possible. If nothing is currently a selected object, the Copy menu item, button, whatever, is shown as disabled until something is selected by the user.
By contrast, whatever exists for the user (button, menu, etc.) can’t reflect an accurate state of whether it is possible to paste without taking 2 things into account:
1. Something is on the clipboard. If there is only ever one application visible on the screen, and it can only interact within itself, this can be done entirely locally if there is never a transition away from the application’s window. This assumes no support for other background applications pasting something,
2. The type of data on the clipboard: if you have a strictly text-based application that has no graphics support whatsoever, no intelligent conversion exists from a picture on the clipboard into raw text, as one example. Clipboards in GUI-supporting OSes support more than one type of data on the clipboard at a time, but it may not have a format that makes sense for different apps, so it’s not enough to know if data is available for pasting, it’s also required to know if it makes any sense in the current context.
Thus, it makes sense to check if there’s data on the clipboard when transitioning to being a visible foreground app, or if it is also displayed with another application also displayed, but if it is the only foreground app and there’s no reason to expect a background app to paste to the clipboard to exchange data, then constantly checking the clipboard makes no sense, but doing it each time the application has been made visible to the user makes perfect sense.