Leaf&Core

iOS 14 Privacy Feature Catches TikTok Snooping on Your Clipboard

Danielle from Leaf and Core
Reading Time: 3 minutes.

TikTok sends the contents of your clipboard to their servers every time you type a letter. Apple said they’d increase privacy in iOS 14, but it turns out they may have done more than they let on. Here;’s what Apple did talk about. App developers have to self-report what they do with your collected data, and the App Store will show you all the permissions and data an app collects. You can move your accounts over to a Sign in with Apple ID account, which hides your identity from the developer so they can’t target you across platforms or sell your data. There’s even a new indicator that shows exactly when the microphone or camera is on, something that can finally answer the question of whether or not Facebook is spying on you. But one feature we didn’t expect to pay off so soon—a feature we didn’t even know about—has revealed some dangerous privacy violations in TikTok.

TikTok is a fun video social network. People can create their own videos to music, with special effects, or just update their friends. It’s like Instagram stories if Instagram stories were more fun and you could just follow people for their stories. However, TikTok is owned by a Chinese firm, Bytedance, with close ties to the Chinese government. As a result, it engages in all the things you’d expect from the Chinese government. They collect large swaths of data, censor videos and have hidden videos about LGBTQ issues and protests, and they answer the the Chinese government. The result is an app rife with censorship and data collection. iOS 14 showed us just how bad it really is though. TikTok has been snooping on your clipboard.

Clipboard Snooping

In case you’re not aware of what the term means, your clipboard is what you copy/paste from. When you copy something, it goes onto your clipboard. As it turns out, TikTok constantly looks into this. Not just when you open the app either. Firefox and other browsers look at your clipboard when you open the app so that, if they detect a link, they can let you open it without having to even paste it in the URL bar. But TikTok was checking the clipboard with every keystroke.

TikTok claims they’re not snooping on the clipboard, that the warning is being mistakenly triggered due to anti-spam protection they have in the app. But it’s clear that the popup is triggered when a developer calls Apple’s methods for reading from the clipboard. Since Apple controls how developers access this data, the alert can only go off if the app is trying to access this data. Even if they were accessing the clipboard for an anti-spam purpose, their response would still be misleading.

But this isn’t the first time TikTok was caught doing this. We knew TikTok was reading from users’ clipboards since March. Back in March, the company that owns TikTok, ByteDance, claimed that the clipboard snooping would stop “within a few weeks.” Obviously that was an outright lie. Their response, below, is also likely untrue.

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. TikTok is committed to protecting users’ privacy and being transparent about how our app works.

– TikTok’s response to the controversy

TikTok’s “Mistakes” or “Bugs” Represent a Pattern

They did claim it was a bug. Interesting. Although, it’s not uncommon. TikTok has had the same response when users complained that LGBTQ content was hidden, or protest videos were hidden. They removed videos from U.S. users complaining about China’s concentration camps for Uighur Muslims. They later claimed this was a mistake, but not before going through the trouble of banning the girl who started the trend. This is absolutely a service that uses censorship and elevates accounts to further the agenda of the Chinese government, which attacks LGBTQ people, Muslims, and anyone speaking out against the oppressive regime.

TikTok is a fun social network that you absolutely shouldn’t be using. It gives control of data and speech to a company that works closely with a government that believes in limiting speech and knowing everything about their citizens to better control them. Make no mistake, you should not be using TikTok. Giving them access to your videos for facial recognition, object identification, connections between users, and collecting everything you type in the app for analysis, on top of blocking topics the Chinese government doesn’t like? Yeah. Don’t use TikTok.

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