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Apple to Block Mac Apps From Secretly Accessing Your Clipboard

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Apr 12, 2001
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Apple is planning to implement a change to pasteboard (aka your iPhone's internal clipboard) that will prevent Mac apps from being able to read the pasteboard without the user being alerted, according to information Apple has shared with developers.

apple-developer-app-feature.jpg

In macOS 16, Mac users will get an alert when a Mac app reads the pasteboard without direct user interaction. This change means apps won't be able to surreptitiously view the things you've copied and pasted.

Mac users won't see an alert with a direct pasteboard-related action, like when copying and pasting text within an app that supports it. Users will be notified if an app tries to view pasteboard data when the paste feature hasn't been used.

Apple says that the Mac pasteboard will work similarly to the iOS pasteboard going forward. On the iPhone and iPad, Apple blocks apps from snooping on pasteboard data, and has done so since iOS 14 after security researchers found that dozens of popular iOS apps were reading the contents of the pasteboard without user consent.

Apple addressed the problem by adding a banner that notifies you when an iOS app accesses the clipboard. In iOS 15, Apple further enhanced the feature by introducing a secure paste option that prevents developers from seeing the clipboard entirely unless you copy something from one app and paste it into the app you're actively using.

With the upcoming Mac changes, Mac developers will be able to "examine the kinds of data" on the pasteboard without actually reading them, improving pasteboard privacy. Pasteboard data used with the privacy-focused API won't show the alert to end users. From Apple's notice to developers:
Prepare your app for an upcoming feature in macOS that alerts a person using a device when your app programmatically reads the general pasteboard. The system shows the alert only if the pasteboard access wasn't a result of someone's input on a UI element that the system considers paste-related. This behavior is similar to how UIPasteboard behaves in iOS.

New detect methods in NSPasteboard and NSPasteboardItem make it possible for an app to examine the kinds of data on the pasteboard without actually reading them and showing the alert. NSPasteboard also adds an accessBehavior property to determine if programmatic pasteboard access is always allowed, never allowed, or if it prompts an alert requesting permission. You can adopt these APIs ahead of the change, and set a user default to test the new behavior on your Mac.
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Apple software engineer Jeff Nadeau mentioned on Mastodon that Apple has come across Mac apps that are continuously scraping the pasteboard in the background, but at the same time, there are apps that need pasteboard manipulation, which is why Apple has designed the new APIs.

Mac apps will also need to get user permission to access the pasteboard in some situations. Apple says that developers are able to test the upcoming pasteboard changes with their apps ahead of when the functionality rolls out to users.

Article Link: Apple to Block Mac Apps From Secretly Accessing Your Clipboard
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/12/apple-mac-apps-clipboard-change/
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Reactions: System603, schneeland, Michaelgtrusa and 6 others
Just checked this out with the terminal command

ITS NOT A BIG DEAL AT ALL!​

If you press Command + V or press Paste in the context menu, YOU WILL NOT SEE ANY POPUP AT ALL!
It's only the first time an app requests to press Command + V for you.

In summary, its just this WHEN AN APP PASTES FOR YOU, NOT WHEN YOU PRESS COMMAND V:
1747094108990.png


And I dont remember seeing this iOS popup since like 2 years ago, this will also show if an app tries pasting for you:
1747094137172.png
 
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Reactions: addamas, MasterControlProgram, iiKurt and 8 others
I hope they’ll change the bizarre text “[some app] would like to paste from [some other app]” some day, which ordinary users can make neither head nor tails of. Something like “Paste copied [media type] from [some other app]?” would make more sense.
 
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WilliApple said:
Its exactly like iOS, I just enabled the feature for my app.

It's basically if you copy once, you need to allow paste one time before you can actually paste anything. After that, you won't get a popup again.
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Mine doesn't go away. In some apps like Google Translate, I get the popup incessantly when I'm trying to use the app (literally like 10 times in 5 minutes).
 
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TechnoMonk said:
Long overdue. Apps have no business snooping clipboard.
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Apps have some business. That’s why apple will allow the app to know the type of data. Otherwise, pasting will be slow and messy because the app can’t prefetch tools to handle what it’s about to get.
 
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platinumaqua said:
I must've missed the memo when the clipboard was renamed to pasteboard
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My understanding is that it was called the Pasteboard on NeXTSTEP, which is the ancestor of Mac OS X. The user-facing description was Clipboard when Mac OS X was introduced, as that was the established name on classic Mac OS, which continued through modern macOS and iOS.

Mostly for compatibility reasons, the underlying programming interfaces still use NeXTSTEP names such as NSPasteboard, inherited for consistency by later programming interfaces such as UIKit for iOS (UIPasteboard).
 
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I’m going to be pretty pissed off if this messes up the workflow I currently have with Paste for Mac, which is the pasteboard app I use. Wish Apple would just buy them or Sherlock it, the OS should have a pasteboard in the year 2025 for crying out loud.
 
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dempson said:
My understanding is that it was called the Pasteboard on NeXTSTEP, which is the ancestor of Mac OS X. The user-facing description was Clipboard when Mac OS X was introduced, as that was the established name on classic Mac OS, which continued through modern macOS and iOS.

Mostly for compatibility reasons, the underlying programming interfaces still use NeXTSTEP names such as NSPasteboard, inherited for consistency by later programming interfaces such as UIKit for iOS (UIPasteboard).
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pasteboard has a server client daemon service relationship and clipboard would be an abstraction layer in the user space.

Pasteboard includes output information to all logs that allow a sysadmin to maintain services optimally and detect errors. Pasteboard is still current.

They use OpenStep nomenclature names.

NeXTSTEP was NXPasteboard nomenclature.
 
macduke said:
I’m going to be pretty pissed off if this messes up the workflow I currently have with Paste for Mac, which is the pasteboard app I use. Wish Apple would just buy them or Sherlock it, the OS should have a pasteboard in the year 2025 for crying out loud.
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You press "Allow" once just like iOS. Nothing else, the end, forget about it for that app.
 
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This only works when devs use the official SDK from apple. Devs can probably side step this by creating their own private functions to read the clipboard
 
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