Watch out for Tik Tok and these popular apps that watch your copy and paste

Without user consent, many apps have an eye on the smartphone clipboard when copying a link, address, or phone number. The beta of iOS 14 made it possible to flush them out thanks to a new security function.

Once is not custom, it is Apple which made it possible to flush out a flaw in an application. We can even talk about dozens of applications , and the most famous of them is none other than Tik Tok . The social media phenomenon was flushed out by iOS 14, Apple’s next operating system for iPhone and iPad .

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Expected for fall , iOS 14 is currently in beta , and the latter incorporates a security function that alerts the user when an application has questionable or dangerous behavior. In this case, iOS 14 detects the applications that have access to the clipboard . On computer or smartphone , we copy many elements, such as a phone number, a link, a password to save time, but also addresses, files and other information personal. Each time you paste this item, it empties the clipboard.

More than 50 very popular applications concerned!

However, Tik Tok has the very bad habit of accessing the clipboard when the application is launched, and iOS 14 has noticed this. This was discovered by Jeremy Burge who launched the alert, confirmed by other beta testers. On the side of the editor of Tik Tok, already criticized in the past, we promise to correct this “flaw”, while specifying that it was a tool to protect from spam … It should not be seen no malicious will.

But Tik Tok is not the only application to access the clipboard with the utmost discretion. In total, Ars Technica specifies that this practice would also concern around fifty applications, and many of them are popular such as those of Hotels.com, Reuters or Viber and the  New York Times . What security specialists claim is that access to the clipboard be better protected, as is the case today with the microphone or the camera.