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Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

Right? On what planet should an app be allowed to read or write to the clipboard? The only piece of software that should access the clipboard is the keyboard, and even that I have trouble trusting with all of these predictive services. I’d like to feel more confident that my most used device isn’t loaded up with keyloggers.

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On Android, one of the suggestions when you focus the address bar in Chrome is the URL currently on your clipboard. That's tremendously useful. (It helps that pasting isn't especially ergonomic on Android.)

To be honest I hate that they have gimped the address bar on android chrome. Its just one more button press if i need to edit the url, and i think its creepy that they read the clipboard to be frank.

I replace the address more often than I edit it, so personally I like it. But yes, reception has certainly been mixed.

"paste and go"

Write to clipboard makes sense for "click to copy" functionality. It's a small ergonomic improvement but doesn't seem like the same security risk as reading from the clipboard.

> On what planet should an app be allowed to read or write to the clipboard?

This will be news to pretty much every clipboard implementation that exists, considering that they all rely on programmatic access.

Copying and pasting aren't magic opaque syscalls, they're things that programs implement (or rely on a common library to implement).

Well that should have been fixed years ago, but I would be happy if it was fixed in a way that broke legacy.

Many password managers would erase your clipboard content after you pasted your copied password once. Clipboard managers that retain history of your copied text are also useful, though I don't personally use them. Those are the only acceptable use of unrestricted read/write clipboard access in my opinion.

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