Assuming the average user doesn't really ever 'close' apps, it means TikTok had access to everything a user copied/pasted on that device.
Assuming the CCP can access data on Chinese company servers, then it's fair to assume the CPP is in possession of all of the clipboard contents.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/26/21304228/tiktok-security-...
* Companies do this kind of data collection
* users don’t take the time to make themselves aware of earth their devices and software does
* this kind of data collection isn’t illegal
* OS providers allow this data collection without appropriate controls or use notification
* and others
Some of these problems have been improved upon, but it’s definitely not just one groups fault.
And where it is, there's so much more that's also illegal that just about any nasty thing can be hidden between the trivialities of the resulting consent banner dance.
OS level protections are truly the least bad thing because they can also set arbitrary thresholds that would be impossible to define in law.
Perhaps naively, but I give all the apps (even Tiktok) benefit of the doubt here. It was a fairly common practice for podcast apps (for example), to check the clipboard for an RSS feed and prompt to subscribe to it when adding a podcast. iOS 14 gave new APIs to do that in a more privacy preserving way.
I don't think anyone was busted for anything nefarious, but it just reavealed a lack of suitable APIs on the platform.
How annoying! It would be better to register an rss:// handler and let the OS notify the user that a new RSS url has been found {on the clipboard, in html, text file, url, whatever} and ask what to do (perhaps with some automatic permission to send it to your app).