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What I saw was people talking about how lots of apps check what type of content is on the clipboard in order to adjust what they show the user (e.g. if the user
by lilyball 6y ago
What I saw was people talking about how lots of apps check what type of content is on the clipboard in order to adjust what they show the user (e.g. if the user has a photo on their clipboard make it easy for them to attach it). At least at the time I saw the post about this there was no evidence TikTok was actually harvesting the copied data itself.
And what exactly would they want with arbitrary passwords anyway? Using them would basically destroy their business as soon as anyone figured it out, and selling them would not remotely be worth the risk.
- rjvs 6y agoIt’s common and defensible to do it once on startup, apparently tiktok was accessing to clipboard “every few keystrokes” (I read elsewhere it was every 8s). https://www.ilounge.com/news/tiktok-clipboard-data-collection https://www.ilounge.com/news/tiktok-clipboard-data-collectio...
- bluesign 6y agoAs like microsoft teams chat and some popular text editor
- kalleboo 6y agoSince it makes very little sense to check more than once after opening the app - other apps don't randomly put data into the clipboard in the background (I guess they could snag something from a Mac over Handoff but that already pops up an invasive system progress bar giving away the game) - I'm going for incompetence over malice.
- lilyball 6y agoMaybe not even incompetence. It could just be that some sort of periodic UI refresh triggered the clipboard lookup, because why bother caching clipboard data if you can just read it on the fly when updating your UI?
- lilyball 6y agoFWIW I discovered yesterday the Slack app is doing this too (at least if there’s images on the clipboard), as is the Kaiser Permanente app. TikTok is not remotely unique in this regard.
- Closi 6y agoIn a world where Tiktok provided information to a government, arbitrary passwords are useful.