Linkedin: LinkedIn ‘caught’ spying on Apple iPhone users the way TikTok did on iOS 14

Microsoft-owned social media platform LinkedIn has been caught looking through the data of iPhone users after a new iOS 14 beta feature lets users know whenever any app accesses the clipboard. Not just LinkedIn, several popular apps have been caught doing the same and recently TikTok also got flagged. TikTok admitted the flaw and promised to issue a fix. LinkedIn as well has accepted that there is indeed an issue with the app and offered to fix it soon.
A developer took to Twitter to reveal this flaw in the LinkedIn app. He tweeted from the handle @DonCubed a screenshot to showcase how LinkedIn was copying contents of the clipboard.

“LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard every keystroke. IOS 14 allows users to see each paste notification. I’m on an IPad Pro and it’s copying from the clipboard of my MacBook Pro.Tik tok just got called out for this exact reason,” he tweeted.
Apart from LinkedIn or Twitter, other popular apps like Call of Duty, Accuweather, AliExpress and Google News have also been called out for the same reason.
Erran Berger, VP Engineering, consumer products at LinkedIn acknowledged the issue and said that Linkedn doesn’t store this clipboard data but the company will fix it anyways.
“We’ve traced this to a code path that only does an equality check between the clipboard contents and the currently typed content in a text box. We don’t store or transmit the clipboard contents. An example of this is in a library we have open sourced…We will follow up once the fix is live in our app,” said Berger.

Apple has been offering the universal clipboard for quite some time which helps users to copy and paste content across Apple devices. But with iOS 14, Apple has made a major change. It has started to notify users whenever an app accesses the universal clipboard. This is how popular apps are being called out by iOS14 beta users.