Earlier, I paired my laptop with my mom’s phone so that she could send me photos without those getting mangled by some instant message app…
Turns out, she kept getting a notification on her phone every time I copied something, with the full content of my clipboard.
I didn’t clock that clipboard sharing was enabled by default… I’d like to argue that this is not a good design choice.
In my case, I occasionally copy rather personal information… Private messages, passwords, similar information. Clipboard sharing effectively broadcasts potentially very sensitive information to every paired device.
Are those devices secure? In the user’s control?
I can see clipboard sharing be useful, but I very much would not recommend having it be turned on by default, and perhaps make the security and privacy implications clearer to the user.
Hi - while I’d imagine that the majority of times, the person pairing two devices with KDE Connect is the primary user of both devices, and that in general helpful features should default to “on”…I do think it’s worth at least alerting the user when pairing devices to what automated things might start happening as a result.
Perhaps something like “The paired device will be able to send remote commands to this device, and can see the clipboard contents of this device. Use KDE Connect settings to disable those features if you don’t want the paired device to have that access”?
If there’s general consensus on at least adding an alert like that, seems like a good candidate for a wishlist “bug” report in the KDE Connect section of the KDE Bugzilla instance?
It makes sense to me. The current default is basically just asking for a privacy accident to happen. This definitely warrants a bug report on https://bugs.kde.org.
Clearly it needs at least an alert, and possibly a change in defaults.
I’m not super familiar with KCM code, but based on some brief skimming I suspect the relevant code to change this would be either in
Yeah that’s my take on it… At the very least some kind of UI hint would be useful.
I basically see two “levels” of the features KDE connect offers, that seem a bit mismatched when lumped together:
Sending files/images/pings/locating) etc… Maybe moving the mouse around (why isn’t too bad of a risk I guess if you don’t see the screen?), “slideshow remote” whatever that means.
Sending whole commands (On what trust level? User?), receiving literally all clipboard contents (whoa?)
Those are very different features. The first set are at worst annoying if abused, the second are actively dangerous and require far more trust.
For the clipboard thing, I thought it required a user interaction to send it, initially, since there is a button for that on some apps (iOS I think?), but it just sends it constantly?
Perhaps the spicier features there could require the user actively saying “yes” (or “always” if they find it too annoying for every device) to some or the other prompt, not have it just be on by default (resting on an assumption about how people will use KDE Connect, which… Hi, dummy here, I just wanted to send some files around between devices within a home network, lol)