TikTok app caught accessing the clipboard on iOS

Jun 26, 2020 05:34 GMT  ·  By

iOS 14 introduces a new warning that lets users know when an app accesses content in the clipboard, and as discovered recently, there are quite a lot of high-profile and popular apps doing this.

And while some need to read clipboard content for their features (e.g. a package tracker app can be able to automatically import your tracking codes if they’re copied to the clipboard), others do it without a specific purpose.

TikTok is one of the apps that were caught reading the clipboard data on iOS, and by the looks of things, the company says it’s just doing it for users’ own good. In other words, TikTok needs to check out your clipboard because it wants to protect against spam.

How exactly that works isn’t yet clear, but on the other hand, let’s not forget that the content stored in the clipboard can be anything, including sensitive information like passwords.

“Anti-spam feature”

Now that it’s been caught doing this, TikTok says it’s working on dealing with this, so an update would be released to remove the anti-spam feature. The version is already submitted for approval in the App Store, it says.

“For TikTok, this was triggered by a feature designed to identify repetitive, spammy behavior. We have already submitted an updated version of the app to the App Store removing the anti-spam feature to eliminate any potential confusion,” the company told The Telegraph.

Jeremy Burge of Emojipedia discovered that TikTok actually accesses the clipboard data every few seconds when typing.

“Okay so TikTok is grabbing the contents of my clipboard every 1-3 keystrokes. iOS 14 is snitching on it with the new paste notification. In the case of TikTok, why it needs to check the clipboard (and trigger the alert it is being 'pasted') after every 1-3 keystrokes is odd. It CAN be explained as a potential bad implementation of a framework. Or something more nefarious,” he tweeted.

The most recent TikTok version on iOS is 16.6.0, and it’s been published on June 24.