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Facebook iOS App Scrapes Your Clipboard?
- spicyj 11y agoThe app doesn't send anything to the server: https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/655459585642225664 https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/655459585642225664
- i_have_to_speak 11y agoSo says a random tweet. According to Facebook's Privacy Policy [1], "We collect information from or about the computers, phones, or other devices where you install or access our Services, depending on the permissions you’ve granted." Since obviously you've granted it permission to access the clipboard of your device and you've agreed to this Privacy Policy while installing the app, Facebook can legally collect, store and sell the contents of your clipboard. [1] https://m.facebook.com/about/privacy https://m.facebook.com/about/privacy
- mbesto 11y ago> random tweet From the Chief Security Officer of Facebook....
- i_have_to_speak 11y agoAnd the CEO of a car company recently said "This was a couple of software engineers who put this in for whatever reasons."
- dogecoinbase 11y agoCool. If FB feels like making a public commitment to financial liability in the event it's discovered that they violate this, it might almost be worth believing.
- robinh42 11y ago...whose twitter profile says "All tweets are my own blah blah blah [sic]"
- ejcx 11y agoSays a random tweet from Alex Stamos, who is very well respected in the security community...Oh...and Facebook CSO. Looks like the FB engineers just pop the URL and check for "https?://"[0] at 0 in the string. [0] - http://i.imgur.com/AhIpWDe.png http://i.imgur.com/AhIpWDe.png
- itistoday2 11y agoWasn't he only just recently CSO (or similar) of Yahoo? What's the story there? EDIT: found this: http://www.siliconbeat.com/2015/06/24/yahoo-loses-security-chief-alex-stamos-to-facebook/ http://www.siliconbeat.com/2015/06/24/yahoo-loses-security-c... Where it is written: > Stamos also won plaudits this spring at Austin’s South by Southwest festival when he revealed the company will roll out end-to-end encryption for Yahoo Mail by the end of the year. Except, I don't believe Yahoo ever did "roll out" end-to-end encryption for email?
- extrapolate 11y agoA Google search or two leads me here: https://github.com/yahoo/end-to-end https://github.com/yahoo/end-to-end
- itistoday2 11y agoThanks, that's a nice repository. I see that like its parent (Google's end-to-end), it is collecting dust for 99.99% of users.
- mikegirouard 11y agoWhile I wouldn't consider this very active, it's certainly not collecting dust. https://github.com/yahoo/end-to-end/commit/8bf5dca239bb1df3f7f46391dee7d43dfc4810a1 https://github.com/yahoo/end-to-end/commit/8bf5dca239bb1df3f...
- itistoday2 11y ago
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- qq66 11y agoBut there's no way to verify that. Perhaps the OS should show something in the status bar when an app accesses the clipboard.
- jakejake 11y agoUPS does the same thing, scanning for tracking numbers. I don't find it particularly creepy, but it probably should be a privacy setting just like location, camera, etc.
- walterbell 11y agoYes on a new privacy setting. Bonus points for having policy settings that depend on both source and destination, e.g. a custom policy for a string that originates in a password manager.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoAnd then let's default it to deny access, and suddenly we've just destroyed the clipboard. I don't like the direction where this is going. We've created an adversarial situation, where software developers go against users and against each other and then instead of fixing that, we keep destroying features of cooperation and interoperability in the name of "security" and "privacy".
- chillaxtian 11y agothe iOS / OS X sandbox model of file interaction is a good compromise for a similar situation imo. sandboxed apps may only access a file outside of the sandbox via an explicit user interaction with a system UI element, i.e. drag-and-drop a file via OS X drag-and-drop API, select a file in iOS / OS X owned file dialog, share sheets, etc.
- cm2187 11y agoThe clipboard is not for apps to help themselves in what the user does, it is for the user to use directly. If apps do want to programmatically access the clipboard I don't see why not forcing them to ask first.
- callumlocke 11y agoThe suggestion is to prevent apps reading the clipboard, not to prevent the user pasting their clipboard contents into the app.
- userbinator 11y agoIs the disturbing part the fact that this is Facebook doing it, or that apps have access to the clipboard? Because the latter has been the norm for all apps on desktop OSs AFAIK, and enables extremely useful sharing of information between them (I have a download manager that automatically catches URLs, for example.)
- ikeboy 11y agoDesktop apps aren't sandboxed.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoThank God for that. That makes them actually useful. Personally, I find sandboxing not as something desirable, but a symptom of a problem with mobile/web ecosystem.
- interpol_p 11y agoHow is sandboxing directly relevant to the usefulness of an application? It can be relevant to some applications: generally applications that are made more useful by being able to infer things about the global state of your OS. E.g., an unarchiver that wants to default to the current directory instead of asking you each time. But certainly not all. And not even most.
- danieldk 11y agoThe majority of desktop apps that I use on OS X are Sandboxed (from a quick glance: Chrome helpers, Wunderlist, Microsoft Office, Photos, Airmail). I haven't experienced any functionality downgrade since the pre-sandboxing times. As long as iTerm runs without sandboxing, I am happy ;).
- geofft 11y agoAll desktop apps have access to everything. Your download manager can also unlock your browser's saved passwords, read your emails, copy your SSH private key, intercept your IMs, spoof your bank's website, etc. Some of these attacks are more difficult and leave more of a chance of detection than others, but they're all possible. This is widely considered a mistake, but it's also an implication of steady backwards-compatibility in app design -- and in many cases, code -- since the late 1980s. No one expected Lotus 1-2-3 to steal your WordStar documents, partially because neither of these were networked. So the OSes told Lotus 1-2-3, WordStar, and anyone else who came along that they had access to the entire drive and they could be designed as if they had that access, even though they didn't need it. Apps could ship their own Open dialogs; the OS trusted that they would only open files they were told to. A quarter-century later, the Windows and Mac App Stores are trying to reverse this, but the app developers are understandably grumpy because they have a quarter-century of code that never had to deal with such a design principle. And the Windows and Mac App Stores are attempting to reverse this by reference to mobile app stores. Mobile platforms, being an entirely new mental model for both developers and users, could abandon lots of the design principles that make sandboxing hard. There is absolutely a reason why no mobile app has a desktop-style Open dialog: the OS doesn't trust it with that power. There is also a reason that the mobile AV industry is a tiny fraction of the desktop AV industry, despite mobile use having outpaced desktop use.
- rollback 11y agoPretty common to do this for apps where people might want to copy/paste into the app.
- monochromatic 11y agoWhy? If I want to paste, I tap and say paste.
- xuki 11y agoIt's a better experience to show a pop up asking to save a clipboard URL to Pocket rather the user has to tap on a few buttons to do it. The key is to let them switch the feature off.
- monochromatic 11y agoThe ideal user experience would be for the app to forward all my emails, texts, and other personal data to an employee so that the employee could read them and make relevant suggestions. But I don't want that either.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoSome do. It's usually called having a secretary. We must be careful to pick up sane defaults; just shutting down everything because "privacy" is not a way to build useful technology.
- monochromatic 11y agoNobody expects or wants the Facebook to act like a secretary.
- brianpan 11y agoIf your going to Pocket, it's likely that pasting from your clipboard is what you want to do. Not as true for Facebook- would you say you post a link from your clipboard as often as you launch Facebook to read your timeline or post a picture?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ikeboy 11y agoother stuff I'm likely to copy and paste is content I can't remember, things like passwords
- monochromatic 11y agoHow about any url or other data that I happened to copy and didn't intend to share with facebook? It's not at all difficult to think of such a situation.
- wodenokoto 11y agoMy Japanese dictionary has auto look up, so if I copy a word from a website and open the dictionary app, it will look it up automatically. Or as the website claims: it scrapes my clipboard.
- suprjami 11y ago> what can we do? How about stop using this fucking terrible app?
- kercker 11y agoPocket on Android can also do this, I never thought it as a problem, but a functionality that facilitated share of urls from apps that can not share urls to other apps on my phone, but can copy the url.
- rythie 11y agoPocket for iOS does this too.
- irtefa 11y agoGoogle Chrome does the same when you are trying to enter a URL.
- legohead 11y agoAnd Gmail scans your emails in a functional way as well...
- vowelless 11y agoPeople who use password managers tend to use the clipboard to copy the passwords around. I assume those passwords are also available in these apps?
- gelatocar 11y agoThat is kinda worrying, though I don't use that functionality myself. Is there another way that passwords could be passed between apps without using the clipboard?
- TeMPOraL 11y agoMaybe there could be a way to negotiate a secure channel between a browser and password manager. Say, when setting up, a browser gives you a key to retype into password manager, and then it's used to encrypt the password before putting it in the clipboard. Adds one more step for setting things up but saves the clipboard as a whole. People using password managers are already people willing to jump through some hoops to set things up, adding one more hoop shouldn't make things worse.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoHave the password management app emulate a custom keyboard?
- sratner 11y agoKeepass2Android does exactly that, and additionally auto-fills password and confirmation fields when you focus them with the custom keyboard active. Very handy. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=keepass2android.keepass2android&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=keepass2androi...)
- bruceboughton 11y agoiOS disables custom keyboards for password fields, which is a great idea in most scenarios. This is what prevents Agilebits building a 1Password keyboard extension.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- leed25d 11y agoI removed the facebook app from my phone a long time ago. I do not intend to put it back.
- danielrhodes 11y agoThanks for telling us! We all wanted to know.
- pazimzadeh 11y agoInstapaper has been doing this for a while.
- rokhayakebe 11y agoEvery third week there is a problem about privacy and security. How do we solve these issues once and for all? Is it on the OS level, or consumer education, or must the government intervene?
- danielrhodes 11y agoI like this feature and don't think it is creepy. All they are probably doing is regex'ing a URL and if one matches showing it there. Sure they could see some other random thing I have copied, but there is no incentive for them to do anything with that information.
- conradev 11y agoApple actually improved the security of this in iOS 9 by only allowing foreground apps and extensions to read the contents of the clipboard. Previously, Facebook could have scraped it from the background. Now you implicitly grant permission to read your clipboard whenever you open an app or extension. My app Workflow[1] has a great workflow in its gallery that you can run from your widget to clear your clipboard if you regularly copy sensitive information. [1] https://workflow.is/ https://workflow.is/
- donkeyd 11y agoThanks for the tip. I have Workflow on my home screen, combined with the 3D Touch menu this is very easy to use.
- chillaxtian 11y ago> Apple actually improved the security of this in iOS 9 by only allowing foreground apps and extensions to read the contents of the clipboard. very cool! was not aware of this change.
- kfriede 11y ago> My app Workflow[1] has a great workflow in its gallery that you can run from your widget to clear your clipboard if you regularly copy sensitive information. Shameless plug, but the app looks awesome. Would be cool (if not already done) if you could plug into IFTTT to fill in features that you can't/don't want to.
- conradev 11y agoDefinitely! I made sure to prefix it with "my" so it was clear :) IFTTT integration is on the roadmap!
- gurkendoktor 11y agoAh, so that's why my favourite dictionary app broke! :( You'd keep it running in the background, copy a word in another app, and the dictionary would post the definition & pronunciation as a local notification. So much better than share sheets and multitasking. RIP, hack!
- ForFreedom 11y agoFlipboard used to scrape it before Facebook. So this is not new
- EpaL 11y agoFor those using iOS in the enterprise and worried about data leakage, this sort of thing should give you pause. This sort of thing is difficult to detect in the AppStore Review process so apps that may appear benign could quite easily use this method to try to steal sensitive information with little risk of detection. We've been lobbying Apple for a while now to improve the controls around clipboard data; specifically to allow us a policy that prevents prevents personal / unmanaged apps from seeing data that was copied from enterprise / managed apps. It might not solve the personal privacy issues but would significantly reduce this as a risk for corporate data.
- fuj 11y ago...and this is one of the many reasons that any organization that does care about security "still" uses BlackBerry
- cm2187 11y agoDoes that happen even when the facebook app is not active? Does the content gets uploaded?
- PSeitz 11y agoSame on android, my japanese dictionary checks the clipboard for automatic searches. I was surprised that it didn't require any authorizations. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cal.pas.ultimatejapanese https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cal.pas.ul...
- adam101 11y agoWith Protect My Privacy (http://apt.thebigboss.org/onepackage.php?bundleid=org.protectmyprivacy.pmp http://apt.thebigboss.org/onepackage.php?bundleid=org.protec...) you can control which application can access your clipboard (and many other things) on jailbroken ios.
- vbezhenar 11y agoI think it's weakness in iOS security architecture. App shouldn't be able to access clipboard by default. iOS should provide API to call context menu with Paste menu item and that menu should be protected from app intervention, so user can paste clipboard anywhere but app can't force him to do that. And if App provides some extended functionality for which it need to constantly monitor clipboard (I never used such app), it needs special request from user and special flag in plist file, so moderator can review it.
- heyitskevin 11y agoThe Plex app accesses your clipboard every time you open the app to check if what's in there is a link. If it finds a link it asks you if you want to add that link to your Plex Queue. This functionality is used to add videos from the web to your Queue for later viewing.
- wahsd 11y agoFacebook is simply an evil company that you should loathe just like any other malicious operator on the internet. What the heck is wrong with people that everyone would be so smitten with the psychopaths at Facebook. How would you feel if any number of malicious actors did any number of the horrible things Facebook does on a regular basis? I can tell you, you would be pissed off. But instead, you simply feed ever more information into the Facebook global surveillance system. Good job.