Not sure if TikTok does something similar, but there are certainly innocent reasons for checking the clipboard.
Even if you're only looking for a shipping tracking number and then only so that you can provide useful auto-populate, will you lose out by only checking the clipboard when the user hits your text input field? Is it that much to ask that you find the least offensive way to serve your user?
On the other hand, what will you lose when the news gets out that you've created a keylogger? What about when someone else at your company pushes you to monitor for something else for strategic advantages? Or what about when another developer doesn't understand the implications and now your app is responsible for revealing passwords or other sensitive information? Are all of these worth saving one click?
Now, if they had evidence that the data from the keyboard was being sent up to a server, that'd be a different story.
Personally, I would prefer a world where nothing can pull from the copy buffer, it needs to be actively pushed by the user. It seems crazy to me that that isn't the case.
A notification that they’ve already done it is not enough. It should tell you every time even if you approved it.
The only explanation I can come up with for why Apple isn’t making this opt in like location is it is so widespread it would break many apps. I just can’t understand how, or why they wouldn’t announce a transition-by date like with Sign in by Apple.
A notification that they’ve already done it is not enough. It should tell you every time even if you approved it.
The only explanation I can come up with for why Apple isn’t making this opt in like location is it is so widespread it would break many apps. I just can’t understand how, or why they wouldn’t announce a transition-by date like with Sign in with Apple.
Up until now there’s been no way the user has been offended because they haven’t known it’s happening. So there’s no real incentive to do it when you focus on a text field vs anything else.
And more broadly, there isn’t a downside if you use the API honestly: e.g. to check for a numeric code that matches whatever regex for one of your orders and otherwise disregard the data immediately. I’d bet a good number of users find it useful.
So let's say you're making the tracking notifier, and you work for UPS. The regex is `1Z[0-9]{16}`. All good, you're being nice, someone opens your app and you already know what shipment they're interested in. Then a "growth hacker" joins your group and mentions that it'd be nice to know how many of your customers also use FedEx, so the regex is changed to also grab FedEx tracking numbers (`(1Z)?[0-9]{16}`, I think). And now someone gets the genius idea of checking up on package shipped by competitors and popping up a notification "tired of waiting on DHL? UPS delivers within 2 days 99.995% of the time" when they miss a delivery. Even though they never asked UPS abotu their DHL package.
See how that progresses? See how it's offensive, even if you're not annoying your user more than you normally would with spammy push notifications, and even before your user suspects that you're spying like this? Do you see how this whole series of escalations aren't available, or at least not as easy, if you only check the copy buffer when it's likely a user is about to paste? Instead of "tweak what we already have" you have to "include a new snooping routine".
If you're thinking "all is fair in love and war" here, and this seems like genius marketing: 1) this is your heads up that your morals are not in line with society's, and 2) do you think this will be a marketing win if the regex is loosened enough that you pop up a UPS notification about "package with tracking number (phone number someone just gave me)"? What about if my UPS account for work notifies me about some very private personal packages? Especially some shipped via OnTrak?
Anyway, as I said in my first comment. I'm disappointed that people don't think they should try to worry about downsides and failure modes of their design and engineering work. Maybe it's a matter of norms and priorities being different in the consumer app/web world vs. many other domains.
"Is it that much to ask that you find the least offensive way to serve your user?"
So, suppose UPS is not doing anything that you've just described. Say they are regexing for UPS numbers only. How would that be considered offensive?
Suppose you want to offer this capability but only check the copy buffer when the user has signalled an intent to provide you with input. How is that not the least galling design decision? I'm having trouble figuring out how to express that it also serves as a personal (and team-internal) signal that "we are here to serve the user, and not to take advantage of them, even if that's inconvenient for us". Maybe that doesn't matter, or maybe lacking that is what leads to things like the Uber "Ride of Glory" blog post and worse?
Something I meant to imply in my first comment, but not the reply to you, is that furthermore limiting your exposure to user data limits the likelihood that a series of bugs puts it into your logs and then leaked out to the world. No, it's not done on purpose, but no amount of good intentions fixes it. Defaulting to being less invasive also reduces your likely level of impact.
In your toy example of my app's main screen being a text box where the user can insert a tracking code, yes, I do lose by making the user wonder every time "you know I have a tracking code why are you making me type it in?" In a more realistic example of, say, Amazon, where the "track my previous order" button is not the main screen of the app, the convenience is further increased by doing the detection automatically.
And what about non-text clipboard contents? Not every interface is a text-style document into which content can be embedded. Even "Copy URL" requires knowing that "share website" shared a URL and not a website. It doesn't make sense for images at all.
Which iOS and macOS already have, they are called data detectors. When the message arrives notifying you of the tracking number, you can select “track this parcel” from the context menu. No need for an app to snoop on the clipboard.
If I copy a link on Android, I can go to Chrome, click on the address bar, and it suggests "link you copied: $whatever". This is how this should work. If there's an image in my copy buffer, it doesn't need to do anything. I don't need Chrome monitoring my copy buffer when I'm doing other things in case I copy something that looks link-like.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
How about: stop apologizing for billion dollar corporations. Fault can be placed on both the OS and applications. I expect better, from everyone.
slippery slope arguments go all the way to the bottom
Sounds good. There are clipboard apps on iOS that work with a share sheet and also get the clipboard content when launched. They could be modified to have the user actively paste in the app to store something if the app is launched in the foreground (just like crude apps on a desktop would).
It wasn't offensive to the user before iOS changed the rules. It is just a technical detail behind a small feature.
Every app can do bad things. For example, every app with a password field can use that data to crack your account on others services. You shouldn't reuse passwords but we all know that too few people follow that rule.
If you installed an app from some company, it means that you trust it to some extent and with that in mind it is reasonable to think that the issue is innocious. If you think a company wants to steal your passwords, why did you install its app in the first place? Clipboard or not, it will find a way of doing bad things.
That almost makes the notifications useless.
Apple puts app developers through an annoying review process. It seems like the least they could do is check with the developer on why they want that access and see if its legit or not.
If your app is checking the clipboard or my location on a frequent basis, it's your job as the developer to communicate to me why you are doing this.
If the notifications are frustrating, users will turn off the permissions or remove the application entirely. Crappy snooping applications are gone. Mission accomplished.
Will they? That didn’t happen with the UAC dialogs in Windows.
And just about every PM or founder I've ever worked with seems to think like this - when given the choice between the straightforward, obvious way to do something, and some crazy, brittle, privacy-abusing hack that might improve conversion by 5%, they'll choose the latter every time. This is a perfect example of this kind of thing, "let's just check the contents of the clipboard every 2 seconds in case the user doesn't know how to paste." It might have even been born out of real complaints from a fraction of users who really can't figure out how to paste. And somewhat depressingly, in the defense of PMs it does actually seem to work sometimes and improve conversions. And all your competitors are probably doing it already anyway. So the only way to stop this crap is for the platform itself to step in.
Another example that's also fixed in iOS 14 - Apple already provides a perfectly usable share sheet for choosing a photo, where I can look through my whole phone and pick just a single photo to give to the app. But for some crazy reason, seemingly every app wants to recreate this themselves. So they require you to give them access to your entire photo album so that they can display it back to you with a marginally different design and a different color background than the default page. Now in iOS 14, Apple is giving the user an option to just pick individual photos to share anyway, and then presumably make it appear to the app that those are all the photos you have on your phone.
Two very welcome improvements IMO.
Edit: fair responses, all. You've convinced me.
A few months ago I would have said the same thing as you, but then I experienced some applications which looked at what I had copied and automatically did all the hard work. It's a pleasant surprise to see it happen, and having experienced it, I am happy that the applications have this functionality.
Of course if you're living in a world where all the code on your device is considered hostile, then you may not want this. But I use almost only free software and there you can generally start with a presumption of goodwill instead of starting with a feeling of distrust, like with TikTok.
FWIW, the one I use only checks once — upon startup. It's sometimes annoying that I have to kick it out and re-launch if I've copied a tracking URL from e-mail after the delivery tracking app is already open, but now that I know that's the price of privacy, I'm perfectly OK with it.
I believe Slack was one of these. I thought it was useful at the time.
I cannot think of a single good use case of a background app reading the clipboard like TikTok is doing in this link.
If I find someone digging through my mailbox, I don't start rationalizing their reasons for it - I ask them to explain themselves, and that explanation had better fucking be a good one.
I copy passwords from a password vault. I don’t want your app knowing that I just opened Hacker News five seconds ago and have this password-looking text in the clipboard.