6 ms·

Can they access this while running in the background?

• sschueller 10y ago
  Yes, you can write a background service that will be called when there is a change in the clipboard. You can even close the app and it will be restarted in the background when a clipboard change happens. I know this because I wrote an app[1] that does precisely this and looks for a specific URL in the clipboard. I was surprised when I found out I don't need to ask for permission to read clipboard changes. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.schueller.instarepost https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.schueller....
  • m_eiman 10y ago
    Ouch, that sounds like something that should have a permission. Permission for background or programmatic access, none needed to receive pastes initiated by user seems reasonable IMHO.
    • dfox 10y ago
      That would require reliably deciding whether the action was in fact initiated by user, which is hard in browser environment and probably impossible for android.
      • poizan42 10y ago
        The answer to that may actually be quite simple: The keyboard app is the one that should be allowed to read from the clipboard. Now can a keyboard spy on you clipboard contents? Sure. But it can also spy on all your keystrokes, so the trust must already be there.
        • dfox 10y ago
          That assumes that clipboard can only contain text, which I'm not sure whether is so on Android, but on all major desktop UI systems clipboard can not only contain arbitrary data, but even allows for negotiation of supported formats between source and destination.
    • candiodari 10y ago
      But, that's done on websites as well, and frankly it's annoying. Giving apps the ability to put stuff into the clipboard and extract it out again has been made too hard (and one of the few remaining applications of flash). I'd even settle for the ability to put stuff in the clipboard programmatically ... This is a case of overly broad security imho.
      • ploggingdev 10y ago
        > But, that's done on websites as well Can websites running in background tabs access the clipboard contents on the Desktop?
        • btown 10y ago
          The spec says no, but there's no guarantee that a browser implementation doesn't "through an implementation-dependent mechanism" give this access by default. https://www.w3.org/TR/clipboard-apis/#event-handlers-that-are-allowed-to-read-from-clipboard https://www.w3.org/TR/clipboard-apis/#event-handlers-that-ar...
        • emodendroket 10y ago
          In my experience browsers won't let you see the clipboard at all unless the user initiates a paste event.
  • makomk 10y ago
    This is, incidentally, used by KDE Connect and possibly other apps to do clipboard synchronization with PCs.
  • maxxxxx 10y ago
    Wow. That's insane.