So what does this mean, and what can we do? Well, firstly, there isn’t a permission to control access to the clipboard. The NSPasteboard Class is used to access the pasteboard server in AppKit used on OS X apps, while iOS uses the UIPasteboard Class. In iOS, this class can be used to access the General pasteboard used for copy-cut-paste operations (and has existed since iOS 3.0). What this means is that any app has a means to access items in your clipboard. This itself is not as much of as a surprise compared to the likelihood that I’ve never seen this functionality used in such a creepy way before. Apparently Pocket and Chrome have similar behaviors, just not that I’ve seen.
I don’t want iOS checking to see if I’m okay with an app having access to my keyboard when I first launch but unfortunately, evil corporations make behavior like that necessary.