MacRumors has a summary of new security features coming in iOS 14.
With every iteration of iOS, Apple adds new privacy features to better protect iPhone and iPad users, and iOS 14 is no exception. This year’s update is worth downloading for the privacy protections alone, which include Privacy Reports in Safari, recording indicators, an option to share approximate location with apps instead of precise locations, and more.
iOS 14 privacy features: Approximate location, clipboard access warnings, limited photos access and more. (2020, August 21). MacRumors. https://www.macrumors.com/guide/ios-14-privacy/
There are a number of really great ideas in here. One of my favorites is how Apple has handled clipboard access. Instead of prompting the user to allow or disallow clipboard reads, iOS just tells the user if it happened. This tells you how often an app is reading the clipboard, rather than just that it has read it once and may read it again in the future.
There are a number of places where clipboard reads are completely innocuous. In our app BeLooped, for instance, we have several screens where the user can type a code that’s received over email, text message, or given out loud by another user. These screens “taste” the clipboard to see if it contains a code when they first open, and again if you switch to another app and back. If it’s not one of our codes, we do nothing with the value.
I’m pretty confident we can explain this behavior to our users: those prompts will only appear “unexpectedly” on screens asking for a code. But if Apple had prompted for permission instead and included an option to let apps always access the clipboard, you’d have no idea when we were accessing it. This bucks Apple’s pattern of asking first and allowing the app to be given “whenever it wants”-type access, but in a particular case where it makes sense.