Microsoft corp’s LinkedIn was sued by a New York-based iPhone user for allegedly reading and diverting user’s sensitive content such as texts, emails, photos and medical records from Apple Inc’s Universal clipboard application.
According to a report by Bloomberg, the lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court by Adam Bauer claims that LinkedIn modified its iPhone and iPad applications to divert sensitive data. The iPhone and iPad applications that are programmed by LinkedIn uses Apple’s Universal clipboard to read and siphon the data and can draw information from other Apple’s gadgets.
Universal clipboard application allows the user to copy text, images, emails and videos from one Apple device to another.
The suit seeks to represent a class of users based on alleged violations of federal and California privacy laws and a breach of contract claim.
As per the reports from last week, a total number of 53 apps including TikTok and LinkedIn reads the user’s Universal clipboard content but TikTok later addressed and fixed the issue.
According to the suit, LinkedIn has not only been keeping an eye on clipboard information of Apple devices but it has also been spying on their nearby computers and other devices.
Earlier this month, Twitter user @DonCubed noticed this issue on LinkedIn, where the professional networking app was repeatedly caught copying from the clipboard of his MacBook Pro.
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. pic.twitter.com/l6NIT8ixEF
— Don 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 urspace.io (@DonCubed) July 2, 2020
In reply of this, Erran Berger, the head of engineering at LinkedIn tweeted that “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”.
This tweet came out at the point when news spread that LinkedIn was copying the data or information from the user’s clipboard.
As per Forbes, Apple recently released a privacy feature for iOS14 developers to know as paste notifications. This feature alerts the user when their copied text on the clipboard is accessed by other apps and the complete access will be made available by the fall of 2020.
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