The Windows clipboard can now store up to 25 items for up to twelve hours, and optionally synchronize them across your devices. Windows 10.1809 complicated things further by introducing the Windows Clipboard History (a.k.a Cloud Clipboard). The user has to copy something else to overwrite the clipboard. No operating system offers a convenient way to quickly clear the clipboard, though. However, this assumes that the user knows to clear their clipboard before switching back to the unrelated app. Limiting access to foreground apps is a good security measure that can help prevent third-party apps from spying on the clipboard. iOS version 14 even began to display warnings whenever foreground apps access it. Background apps on iOS have never had access to the clipboard. Likewise, all apps on MacOS have full access to the clipboard. Traditional Windows apps - still the most common kind of application - have full access to the clipboard at all times. The newer Universal Windows Apps (“store apps” or “UWP apps”) introduced in Windows 8 limits access to the clipboard to foreground apps only. Android version 10 introduced new restrictions to keep background apps from accessing the clipboard. The clipboard has traditionally been unconditionally available to all applications. It can even expose our passwords and personal data to new avenues of attack from malicious software running on your other devices. However, they also make the interactions more complicated and the behavior more unpredictable. New features like cross-device synchronization and clipboard history can be very useful. Yet, we copy and move about personal information, passwords, company secrets, and a whole lot more using the same old clipboard without blinking an eye. Traditionally, every running process on our computers has had full access to everything that lands on the clipboard. It’s a shared area of computer memory used to quickly duplicate information from one app - one data silo - to another. The clipboard was invented in 1973, and it was never designed to be secure. Like everything else these days, it’s increasingly getting tied up with other people’s servers (“the cloud.”) So, what does that mean for your clipboard privacy? It lets us copy and paste text, images, files, and data between different applications. The system clipboard is part of every modern operating system.
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