iPhone Copy/Paste App Pastebud Delivers Copied Text to Random Strangers

Pastebud, the app that lets you copy and paste text from email and Safari, has been sending the copied emails (including personal information) out to anybody but the original user.

We were excited about Pastebud, but reports are showing that the full text of the copied emails, which are sent to an online clipboard, are being sent out to the wrong users. Harry McCracken at Technologizer noticed that he was receiving totally unknown emails from Pastebud, and many had names and other personal information. Further, none of the text he was hoping to copy came back to him, which means some stranger almost certainly had access to his emails.

Jed Schmidt, the creator of Pastebud, figured out the problem pretty quickly: the directions weren’t clear enough, so users had been sending their text to be copied to the wrong email address, leading to a sort of communal pool of emails that got sent out randomly. It should be fixed now, but it’s just one more lesson to read the warning carefully: Pastebud is not the tool to use if you’ve got top-secret blueprints or a mistress holed up in an apartment somewhere. [Technologizer]