Haven’t we all been advised by our seniors, working professionals and career gurus to build a kickass LinkedIn profile and grow our connections base in order to exploit the best career opportunities available in the market?
According to the data available on statista.com, India has the second-highest number of LinkedIn users, lesser than only the United States of America, as of April 2020.
About LinkedIn
Microsoft Corp’s LinkedIn is an employment-oriented platform that allows its users to share their professional background in terms of their achievements, interests and employment history on their profile and strengthen their professional relationships.
It helps the users to find the right job and internships depending on their interests and qualifications. It also does a similar role for the recruiters in terms of finding the right candidate for their organizations.
Recent Controversy About LinkedIn
On July 10, a New York resident, Adam Bauer, filed a lawsuit in the San Fransisco Federal Court against LinkedIn for allegedly reading and diverting content from the Universal Clipboard app on Apple devices.
The Universal Clipboard app allows the users to copy content, including photos and videos, on one Apple device and paste it on another.
The complaint claims that the app not only reads data on a particular device on which it is installed but on all Apple devices owned by the user. This was possible due to the Universal Clipboard feature available on iOS and macOS.
The lawsuit claimed that LinkedIn’s app was reading the data on clipboard “a lot”.
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How Was The Issue Exposed?
Last month, Apple rolled out a new iOS 14 privacy feature “paste notifications” to the developers. Reportedly, this feature intimates the users when the content on their clipboard is accessed by any external apps.
In a matter of a few days, 53 apps including the popular content creation app TikTok were exposed for allegedly reading the copied data on the clipboard. Another renowned app, LinkedIn was caught spying on the sensitive user data on every keystroke.
Don Morton, the CEO of Urspace was the first one to raise an alarm on this issue.
He also wrote an editorial in which he warned the users that all credit card numbers and other sensitive information go through the clipboard. He also expressed his concern over the fact that the app was accessing the clipboard without permission.
How Has LinkedIn Responded?
Soon after Don Morton’s tweet, Erran Berger, the vice-president of LinkedIn, defended the app stating that it was the code path that does an “equality check” of the content copied on the clipboard and that typed on LinkedIn. He further stated that the app doesn’t store or transmit such data.
He also declared that the bug would be fixed and the updated version will go live thereafter. On July 5, LinkedIn reportedly released the updated version for Apple devices.
Regarding the lawsuit, sources suggest that LinkedIn officials are aware of the complaint and are reviewing the same.
Image Sources: Google Images, Twitter
Sources: Reuters, Forbes, The Print
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This post is tagged under: LinkedIn, Apple, iOS, macOS, LinkedIn sued, privacy breach, social laws, Microsoft, Universal Clipboard, Sensitive Information, Paste Notifications, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, why did Apple sue Linkedin, did LinkedIn actually breach privacy, how secure is LinkedIn
