I used to use TickTick as my to-do list. I moved away from it because it read my clipboard constantly. Likely, it wasn't nefarious at all, but there was no way for me to audit it... The app is closed source, and the permission is granted regardless.

I'm so glad GrapheneOS supports this. P.S. If you're on GrapheneOS, this isn't enabled by default, but it is a global toggle - Please enable it.

Presumably apps can plug in entries in the system wide context menu? E.g. I have an Anki menu item (not talking about app selection screen to share content!) when selecting text in Firefox

I'm not sure if this was the documentation defined workaround, but they added the ACTION_PROCESS_TEXT intent, which could basically give near identical UX.

For what it's worth, grapheneos allows you to control this permission.

Why would the Belgian post hack your phone?!? Of all the things to be suspicious of, that one's low on my list.

Yeah agreed. The Toast notification is terrible UX. Thanks for letting me know an app already read my address/CC number/privatemessage/image.

There are significant drawbacks with that: Many applications offer different paste actions via menu entries and/or different shortcuts, and sometimes via macros. (I use such non-default pasting all the time.) So there would have to be a mechanism to manage the ways an application is allowed to perform pasting, and to have the user selectively permit or forbid the various ways.

Additionally, the clipboard is often used to copy items within the same application, a mechanism which again can be involved in a multitude of application commands; or else the user must be burdened with having to distinguish between an application-level and the system-level clipboard. This can be partially solved by always allowing pasting of content copied from the same OS process, but multi-process applications would still face hurdles.

Another variation of that is scripting. I have various scripts and CLI aliases that take the current clipboard contents and do something with it.

While the clipboard can be made more secure than it traditionally is, these security measures come with the usual trade-off of making things more annoying for the user.

It works moderately well in securing against a program going rogue and trying to prevent the user from moving the data on their device to another program serving them better. (Or underrated but important, making it less painful to enter and re-enter information in say a dark pattern subscription cancellation form.) Unfortunately it's easily defeated as a security mechanism, but it's still way better than nothing.

One simple solution is just to gate the programmatic access by confirming with the user when the app wants to read the clipboard.

What would you do instead?

Your comment is bordlerine absurd given the utility of such a thing as copy and paste. If it is satire, then you got me.

Today's paranoid times?

The current status quo for software architecture is giving a swarm of LLM agents root and full access to user data and letting them run amok, unsupervised, connected to a proprietary remote black box service either being monitored by Palantir or the CCP. What is this "paranoia" you speak of?

Could make a copypasta out of that (ha, ha.).

But like that genuinely applies to a quite large amount of things. Screenshots, screen recordings, actual regular physical cameras, unencrypted physical cables, publically-usable GPS, microphones, etc. (these are even reasonably-realistic - Wayland & phones have restrictions for screen(shots| recording), backslash on cameraful glasses, DRM, criticism of airtags, leaking typed text through the typing sounds)

Could even go broader and count in people being non-anonymous online, and people being anonymous online, as both being bad for security; were the world to have settled on one, the other would be utterly crazy.

Giving semi-arbitrary anything to LLMs should absolutely very-trivially count in this too, except that for whatever reason it's very often just not? Clipboards would get a pass just fine.