Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

So since this is so pervasive... curious if anyone has actual facts as to whether this is:

1) A common UX pattern to detect relevant clipboard links in the app (e.g. open a reddit link automatically) -- many apps do this type of thing (e.g. Photoshop will use the dimensions of a clipboard image when creating a new image), but nobody's pointed out specific such functionality in LinkedIn (or reddit)

2) A third-party library (analytics, advertising) which does this automatically, which the app developers (LinkedIn, Reddit, etc.) weren't even aware of. If so, why though -- is there some particular analytics, tracking or fingerprinting reason? I'm having a hard time thinking of any particularly good one

3) Something else, like a common text editor library that checks the clipboard by default for some legitimate reason like preparing for formatting, images, etc., that is maybe just lazily coded (checking clipboard on every keystroke, rather than just a paste command)

I'm just curious if anyone has facts. Because there's a world of difference between good intent, questionable intent, bad intent, and lazy intent.

#3 for linkedin. if fact they applied a quick fix that you can check yourself here: https://github.com/linkedin/Hakawai/commit/c3f89585c097863c2...

also looking at what they were trying to do in the first place -- check if contents was pasted... and whether the text would be autocorrected?! -- it all looks to me like apple has a bad, or not well understood, clipboard API.

apple needs to set guidelines around the clipboard API.

One common use case with a third-party library is for deep linking [1]. The deep link is copied with javascript in the browser, then after installing the app it can open right to where you were on the web.

[1] https://github.com/firebase/firebase-ios-sdk/blob/c8625ec52e...

Facts as you define them would be impossible to confirm. You would need to trust the stated intentions of each app and framework found to be doing this. Nothing short of legal discovery will have a chance at defining facts about their intentions. We can only evaluate their response for maturity, competence, and authenticity, and combine that with past knowledge to try and evaluate whether their stated intentions are an accurate reflection of their true intentions.

For example: "Did they honestly make this mistake or were they planning to use that innocuous framework call to implement clipboard-theft?" cannot be proven to be "honest" as a lack of evidence of dishonesty will be interpreted by doubters as "we haven't found the evidence of dishonesty yet". There are no facts that can usefully satisfy this question.

It would speak highly of LinkedIn, though, if they were to announce that they've also evaluated their Android app (where this warning is absent) and identified and removed code there as well. But that, itself, is no proof of either honest or dishonest intentions, any more than any other facts will be.

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