If you find it hard to believe that a company such as Apple, Microsoft, or Google might intentionally leave their users exposed to blatant security flaws such as allowing apps to steal the data on your mobile device clipboard, good luck in kindergarten this semester because you must be 5 years old. Major corporations now have the art of turning their customer’s vulnerability into profits, and henceforth we shall constantly being abused by these tyrannical titans of tech.
Those of us in the ultra-paranoid computing demographic of IT security freaks are constantly having to squeegee our brains off the wall from having our minds blown by news of egregious security flaws that seem to gaslight the corporation/client relationship. For example, why would Apple feel the need to ask my permission to send analytics metrics from the phone to improve it’s function, but NOT ask me if they could share the contents of the clipboard? That’s where I dump my shredded soul to be scavenged by the devil, and babble in front of the bathroom mirror like a clinically insane maniac. If I ever get a job interview at Apple Inc. (APPL) and they ask me to describe myself, I will just scream “You know me, you’ve seen my clipboard!”.
Leo Laporte, Silicone Valley Guru of consumer tech punditry and Steven Gibson seemed to casually downplay the risks of having your clipboard copied by any so-inclined installed app and barely even mention having your password stolen. According to Steve, Apple caught some app creators “red handed”. How can you get caught doing something that they are allowed to do on the platform. This isn’t a hack. It’s a feature.
Really? Is that how desensitized we are supposed to be these days? Immune to the depravity of Big Tech? Well, then again, LastPass is a sponsor of the show and they use the clipboard to move your passwords from the password manager to the web-form or app input form.
Meanwhile… the U.S. Government denies any accusations of intentionally leaving gaping security holes wide enough to fly a Star-ship Enterprise through and attention diverted to Chinese or Russian hacking.
Meanwhile… some Silicone Valley media have put the finishing touches on the brainwashing. Claiming that:
“The iOS clipboard saga is a testament to Apple’s privacy-first approach”
I’m not sure how dumb I have to be to imagine that having had allow this practice since the inception of the iPhone, merely notifying users when it happens is some kind of privacy approach. Gawd.
Meanwhile… other Silicone Valley media puts a little more pressure on Apple:
All 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.
And that is just the best case scenario. There’s no way to know for sure what they are using your clipboard data for.
Apple has known about this for a long time. 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.
What can I do to stop applications from reading my clipboard?
There does not appear to be a simple solution for users who do not want applications to access their clipboards.
~Face Palm~
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