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Comment by rkagerer | Hacker News Reader

Well, once upon a time you trusted the code running on your device.

In Chrome on Android, the flag you want is under Settings | Site Settings | Clipboard | Ask before allowing sites to read text and images from the clipboard, and I think it's on by default.

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Does that setting affect other Android native apps' clipboard access? It wouldn't seem so.

Funny how you are promoting Chrome and Android when I've known for a fact that Google Maps has done this since forever because when you open the app immediately if and only if it's an address it suggests whatever is on your clipboard as a destination. This means 1) there's code running somewhere grabbing the clipboard and deciding if it's an address (might ping home) 2) it has to copy the clipboard all the time to do that.

Maps doesn't run inside Chrome.

I'm not promoting anything.

iOS very early-on took on a model of not trusting the software you install on it, and for good reason. Android and the web followed soon afterward. This is the expectation today. Doubly so given Apple's chest-beating about privacy. This clipboard scandal is unacceptable.

Which is the whole point behind giving a notification about it. Clipboard use is so core and fundamental, literally every app with any kind of entry box would need to ask ahead or you'd hit that so randomly all the time nobody would pay any attention to the warning.

The current feature being added allows this to happen, for awareness to be raised.

To be honest, I'm surprised we haven't heard of more snoopy apps already, but, I guess that will come when the feature's out of beta.

Apps wouldn't have to ask ahead for a text entry box.... you just have to only grant paste read access when a user explicitly chooses to paste by hitting a button.

> Clipboard use is so core and fundamental, literally every app with any kind of entry box would need to ask ahead or you'd hit that so randomly all the time nobody would pay any attention to the warning.

That's, one way to implement it...

Alternatively, and how I'm pretty sure it already works, is that on paste the clipboard could insert content directly into the control, never involving the app in the process.

Apps with completely custom inputs would need to see the contents, but that's both rare and usually a bad idea in the first place.

Android also had permissions from the beginning.

It only declared and didn't let you individually toggle permissions until version 6.0. You just had to take-or-leave the app as-is. I don't know whether or not it declared them from the very beginning.

It did have them from the beginning, and the set of supported permissions was quite substantial compared to what iOS offered. But you're right, iOS was first to have the ability to grant/revoke individual permissions at runtime

I remember giant take-it-or-leave-it permission warnings for apps back on 2.1 when I had my Nexus One. Updates that changed permissions would just give you the whole list again with no hint as to what had changed, it was awesome in its user-hostility.

> This clipboard scandal is unacceptable.

What do you expect when the CEO holds an MBA?

I think i saw that some of the new betas of ios pop an alert whenever software sniffs your pasteboard.. maybe i'm wrong. Seems like I saw somethng during the tiktok stuff earlier this week.

This would be a great feature for Firefox too! Doesn't look like there's interest though https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1013165

I assume thats because sites dont have access and need a ctrl+v from user to see content

The question is, does Android itself have that flag?

No, in Android the app that is in focus can read from the clipboard without restriction

Background stuff?

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