
(I put the word vulnerability in quotes because, again, Apple has known about this for a long time and initially refused to do anything about it.) These apps have violated your trust by abusing this "vulnerability" in iOS. My advice would be to uninstall all the apps that have been stealing information from your clipboard without your consent. You've just turned off Universal Clipboard Handoff.
#HANDS OFF MY MACARONI HOW TO#
Here's how to do this.ĪDVERTISEMENT Congratulations. This "feature" is called Universal Clipboard or "Handoff." And it is enabled by default on every Mac.įor your privacy, I recommend you turn this feature off immediately.
#HANDS OFF MY MACARONI PASSWORD#
How many sensitive things do you do on your laptop every day? How many passwords to you copy/paste from your password manager? How many emails do you type up? How many websites do you copy/paste to share through private messages?Īll of that is going to your clipboard, which is getting shared with your iPhone, which can then be accessed by various companies through their iPhone apps, and stored in their servers around the world.

Now I'm going to tell you something else that will really make your blood boil: If you use a Mac, your iPhone has access to your Mac's clipboard by default.Īnd this means, by extension, the apps installed on your iPhone also have access to things you copy to your Mac's clipboard.
#HANDS OFF MY MACARONI FULL#
Here's how: You can read the full disclosure document by the security researchers who discovered this exploit here. Seems to be bugging out and showing with every keystroke in TikTok /aFKNfZnpyb- Jeremy Burge June 24, 2020Īpps can even use this clipboard exploit to get your location data without you ever granting them permission. IOS 14 beta has a banner to confirm when you paste from another device (eg copy on a Mac and paste on iPhone) Here's an example of this discovered when Apple started showing clipboard notifications in the iOS 14 beta: Some apps, like TikTok, use this clipboard exploit even while running in the background to steal every single character you type into any app. Here's an insane supercut of several well-known apps stealing the contents of your clipboard (which now triggers a notification in the newest version of iOS.) This was never an issue for Apple until privacy advocates started raising awareness of this earlier this week. And they are just now taking steps to restrict apps' access to your clipboard, and to notify you when an app accesses the contents of your clipboard. There's no way to know for sure what they are using your clipboard data for.Īpple has known about this for a long time. Private messages to your friends and family.Īll of these things are being stolen from you and sent to the data centers of multinational corporations, who will use it to figure out what ads to show you so they can make more money.Īnd that is just the best case scenario.



Think about all the things you copy to your clipboard. These apps often record the contents of your clipboard several times a minute, and send them to their company servers to store for eternity. If you are an iPhone user, everything you have copied to your clipboard on your iPhone can be secretly accessed by various apps. I'm about to tell you something that will shock you, and probably make you very angry.
