LinkedIn Sued Over Reading Apple Clipboard Contents

The business social media platform LinkedIn is being sued by an iPhone user for allegedly reading and redirecting sensitive content from the Universal Clipboard app by Apple Inc. on their phone in a Class Action complaint under California laws.

Apple’s Universal Clipboard allows users to copy and paste text, images, photos and videos between all of a user’s linked Apple devices such as iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers. According to the filed lawsuit by Adam Bauer in San Francisco, the LinkedIn app reads the information in the Clipboard without actually notifying the user.

In the latest updates by Apple Inc., an Apple device will alert the user when the clipboard app reads any content in it by showing a banner saying “pasted from (app name)”. According to the lawsuit, Bauer alleges that this ‘read’ command is interpreted as ‘paste’ instead. -@Reuters.

It is likely that this is a glitch of an Apple privacy update and not LinkedIn since recent media reports over the last two weeks have reported 53 apps including TikTok and LinkedIn to be reading content from the Universal Clipboard.

However, developers and testers of iOS 14 found the LinkedIn app for iPhone and iPad to be ‘secretly’ reading clipboard content ‘a lot’.

Credits: Sundry Photography/Shutterstock