From email to banking, our smartphones are the main hub of our online lives. No wonder that smartphones rival computers as common targets for online hackers. And despite the efforts of Google and Apple, mobile malware continues to land in official app stores
When we ‘copy’ a text to ‘paste’ it later, the text in question goes to a site called ‘clipboard’. It’s like the time memory that we can leave things to use soon after. The mobile also has this memory, and it turns out that there are many apps that have permissions to read what we put there without our permission.
At first it was denounced the fact that Tiktok, the worst enemy of privacy (although Facebook is not far behind), was able to read the portapeles, but it turns out that it is not the only app that does.
A new feature in iOS 14 will alert users when an application accesses the clipboard of their phone, and apparently, happens ALL the time, as lifehacker comments in this video:
In the video they comment that it is normal for an app to read the clipboard at some point. If we go to Chrome’s browser, for example, and want to paste a url into the address bar, Chrome will need to read it. But the evidence has shown how sometimes this access is constant and for no apparent reason. It looks, for example, like Tiktok is constantly accessing the clipboard while using the app.
Logically, it is one thing to read the clipboard, where we may have copied a password, for example, and another is to use that content to do some negative action, but still, it is important that apps only access sensitive content when absolutely necessary, and always with the consent of users.
The risk is clear: we copy the number of our bank card to put it in an online store, then we open a news app and… …Choff…. the app has managed to read our bank card, and we do not know what it will do with it, hopefully nothing…
