LinkedIn taken to court for allegedly snooping on sensitive user info like passwords and credit card details through clipboard data on its iOS app

LinkedIn allegedly snooped on user data present in the iOS clipboard (Image source: LinkedIn)

A California resident filed a lawsuit against LinkedIn for allegedly snooping on user clipboard data on the social media app’s iOS version. The issue was brought to light thanks to a new privacy-oriented feature in iOS 14 that tells users when apps access clipboard data.

Arjun Krishna Lal, 07/13/2020

Business-oriented social media network LinkedIn is at the receiving end of a lawsuit in California that alleges that the platform’s iOS app snoops on user clipboard data. The recently released iOS 14 public beta has a security-oriented feature that lets iPhone and iPad users know when an app access clipboard data.

The LinkedIn app apparently did so without explicitly asking permission. This means that sensitive information like credit card numbers and messages could potentially have been intercepted.

While LinkedIn claims that the issue was a bug which it is sorting out in a future update, it appears that the “bug” causes the LinkedIn app to repeatedly access clipboard data without user permission.

Whether or not the law suit goes through, we expect that LinkedIn will address this rather glaring security issue sooner than later. Because of iOS 14’s new privacy-oriented feature-set, we wouldn’t rule out the possibility of similar issues cropping up in the weeks and months to come with other apps.