As I reported on July 4, Apple iOS 14’s “paste notifications” feature exposed Microsoft-owned LinkedIn to access clipboard content with every keystroke. The next day, I followed this story with someone else after the Reddit app was also taken from clipboard content by reading the iOS 14 alert revelations.
Now, an iPhone user in New York has submitted a fancy action proposal (view through me) opposed to LinkedIn in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California.
The July 10 filing aims to “fix a blazing and indefensible privacy breach,” claiming that LinkedIn had programmed iPhone and iPad apps to abuse the clipboard to “read and hijack the maximum sensitive knowledge of LinkedIn users” without consent or knowledge.
The complaint, filed through Adam Bauer, alleges that the LinkedIn app “spied on its users” as well as other Apple devices belonging to users. This applies to the universal clipboard feature of iOS and macOS devices, which allows you to share clipboard knowledge between them.
In the complaint, Bauer claimed that he did not know that the programs had data from his clipboard “without his affirmative consent through a paste order.” If I had known, Bauer said, then “I wouldn’t have used the LinkedIn app.”
When the iOS 14 collage notification feature was made available to Apple developers in June, it didn’t take long for the first wave of privacy issues to emerge. Initially, those alerts were for 53 programs that accessed Data from Apple’s clipboard. One of them was TikTok, which updated its application on June 27 to save you access.
He was the CEO of Urspace racing portfolio site, Don Morton, who first discovered that LinkedIn not only read the clipboard, but did so with each and every hit. “I’m on an iPad Pro and it’s copied from the clipboard of my MacBook Pro,” Morton tweeted.
Erran Berger, vice president of customer product engineering at LinkedIn, said LinkedIn did not purchase or transmit clipboard content and that the procedure was a component of an “equality check” for content entered into a LinkedIn text box and was, in fact, a mistake. The LinkedIn iOS app was updated on July 4 with “bug fixes”.
The iOS 14 collage notification alerts were presented after a report from Mysk developers. Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk explained to Apple how they discovered that location data had leaked through the system’s meeting table in January.
A LinkedIn spokesman, Dan Miller, told me that “we are and are reviewing” the lawsuit.
I contacted Bauer’s legal suggestion for a comment.
I have been a generation journalist for 3 decades and have been editor-in-chief of PC Pro mag since the first factor in 1994. Three-time BT winner
I have been an experienced journalist for 3 decades and have been editor-in-chief of PC Pro mag since the first factor in 1994. A three-time winner of the BT Security Journalist of the Year Award (2006, 2008, 2010) he was also fortunate to be named BT’s Tech Journalist of the Year in 1996 for an innovative feature in PC Pro called “Internet Threats”. In 2011, I won the Enigma Award for my lifelong contribution to computer security journalism. Contact me with confidence [email protected] if you have a story to reveal or a search to share.