The Weather Network App Has Been Reading Your iPhone Clipboard

The weather network ios

Oakville, Ontario-based The Weather Network has announced it has removed code in its iOS app, after iOS 14 has revealed its app can read a user’s clipboard.

The release of iOS 14 beta to developers has turned privacy to the forefront, as the mobile operating system now notifies a user if an app can read your clipboard. Apps such as TikTok, among others, have been found guilty of being able to snoop your clipboard.

The Weather Network announced on Friday, “Privacy is important to us [and] we take it seriously. A recent software release by Apple identified that our app could read contents of the operating system’s clipboard, used if a user wished to share info with us for troubleshooting. Here’s what we’re doing to improve this process.”

In a full statement, the company explains, “in a recent beta software released by Apple, it has been identified that our application could read the contents of the operating system’s clipboard.”

The Weather Network says “clipboard access is part of a diagnostics functionality that was present in our app to help our developers troubleshoot user issues on a user initiated basis, if required.”

“No personally identifiable info was ever copied, and any data gathered was a random ID to ai in troubleshooting and did not use the device’s unique identifier,” explains The Weather Network.

The Weather Network says it has removed the code and has “reached out to Apple for their best practices for troubleshooting moving forward.”

Back in 2017, Pelmorex, the parent company of The Weather Network, acquired a mobile advertising company, to harness user location for targeted ad integration. Pelmorex also runs the text alert system for Canada’s Alert Ready system.

It’s interesting how iOS 14 has revealed how numerous apps have been able to read a user’s clipboard contents. Other apps caught include LinkedIn and Reddit, among many others.

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