In an effort to protect users from data being copied and pasted without their consent- something ‘naughty’ applications could do to steal data – Apple added a new dialog that asks uses to either allow or disallow data from being pasted. The problem is that there’s no way to trust an application. As a result, you can end up seeing the same annoying dialog over and over.
Apple has responded to criticism and is planning to issue a fix for the feature bug.
The purpose of the feature, according to Apple, is so apps get our permission before accessing the pasteboard to paste content from another app. The problem is that it occurs so often that it becomes annoying. And when that happens, people tend to start ignoring the prompts, hitting whatever button gets rid of the annoying dialog as quickly as possible.
As a result, they can and up ignoring potentially important alerts. This is a lesson Microsoft learned years ago when it introduced a ham-fisted version of User Access Control (UAC) in Windows Vista.
The good news is that one of the feature’s inventors, Ron Huang, joined an online discussion about the issue and says that the feature is not behaving as designed and that it will be fixed in an upcoming update to iOS 16 (per Mac Rumours).
Just for laughs, the feature popped up in iPad OS 16.1 (I’m running the beta version) while I was writing this article.
Anthony is the founder of Australian Apple News. He is a long-time Apple user and former editor of Australian Macworld. He has contributed to many technology magazines and newspapers as well as appearing regularly on radio and occasionally on TV.