New Samsung owners should activate this feature (clipboard access alert)

Back when Apple introduced iOS 14, it had a new privacy feature, which quickly exposed some shady practices by developers. It was a clipboard access warning, which would pop up any time an app tried to peer into what you’ve been copying and pasting in recent history.

iPhone users probably remember it now — whenever you would copy a piece of text from, say, Notes and pasted it into your Google search in Safari, you would get a notification “Safari just pasted from clipboard”. This feature is gone from iOS 15 now, but I’ll talk more about that at the end of this article.

Mini scandals quickly erupted, as users were notified that apps like TikTok are prodding through their clipboard once every few keystrokes. Yikes.

Well, the good news is that Google caught on and also introduced a Clipboard Access Warning with Android 12. And it’s on by default! Unless you are on a Samsung phone, that is…

I assume I have your attention by now, so here’s –

How to turn on Clipboard Access Warning on Samsung Galaxy

Samsung’s latest OneUI 4.1 is built on top of Android 12, so it has the Clipboard Access toggle, but it’s off by default. To find it, head into Settings -> Privacy -> and look for the toggle “Alert when clipboard accessed”.

And that’s it. Now, every time any app pastes something from your clipboard, you will be informed by this big, hard-to-miss message, floating right above your keyboard.

It’s definitely a good thing to be informed about. But, it goes without saying, I would suggest you never, ever copy-paste your passwords or any other credentials. Use the default Samsung keyboard, which is supposedly trust-worthy, and enter your stuff by hand. Or use a trusted password manager — Google’s baked in password manager, or Samsung Pass which is backed by Knox, or any other popular 3rd party solution out there.

Why is the clipboard warning gone from iPhones with iOS 15?

As I stated earlier, iPhone users may have noticed that the clipboard access notification is now gone from iPhones and iPads and there’s no way to turn it back on.That’s because Apple took things a step further with iOS 15 — apps are completely blocked from poking around the iOS clipboard. Apple calls it “secure paste” — developers have access only to the information you’ve copied from the very same app. If you go and copy information from one app to another, the receiving app will only see the information you copied, not get access to your clipboard history.

Therefore, the need for the notification has ended, or you know — that’s what Apple believes.