Can widgets on iOS 14 steal your data or record your keystrokes?

Over the past few days, there have been many posts on Facebook that widgets on iOS 14 can silently record your keystrokes. But that’s a myth, because they simply can’t be done.

If you are confused by the widget information is a major security risk, then you are not alone. If you look at your iPhone and wonder what a calendar widget can do with information that you have to touch to see, you’re not alone.

It is said that a dangerous widget when installed will not only notice the times you touch it, but it – in an absurd way – can also trigger a keylogger. That means anything you type on your iPhone will be recorded and sent back to some shady programmer. Every password, account information, every message – who knows, perhaps emoji too – has now fallen into the hands of a villain.

If at Apple had a department dedicated to collecting and analyzing user responses to every new feature in iOS 14, they would shake their heads in frustration that they could not please everyone.

Apple has been heavily criticized for not providing the same widget system as Android. And now, are they determined to take advantage of that system to retaliate against users? You watch a little movie!

Why widgets on iOS 14 can’t steal data or record keystrokes?

We cannot deny the usability of widgets, since they have long been an interesting and useful puzzle for iOS. But did you realize that the only difference between a widget and app icons that have been around since 2007 on iOS is … size, and how do they take advantage of that size?

In addition to Apple’s own Clock app, which always displays the current time, the apps have an icon that you tap on to open the app. Widgets are super large icons that you tap on to open a corresponding application.

There are no widgets that do anything other than show off super large icons and open up an app when you touch them. And that’s why no widget can do anything else.

Large icons are welcome because instead of just being an app developer logo, they can become more useful, displaying text, images, news headlines, anything!

That’s exactly what makes them so useful – and what makes them less useful than you’d expect. For example, it would be really great to be able to tap the Notes widget and immediately write something.

But you can’t.

A widget can display a lot of different information, but it is only visible, and it just sits there, waiting for you to touch to open the application. All widgets are application icons, nothing else.

Why do people think widgets can steal data and record keystrokes?

There are many reasons why some people assume widgets are doing it, and why others agree with that. First, when upgrading to iOS 14, some users receive a notification that their passwords have been leaked.

Of course, it’s not iOS 14 that reveals your passcode, it’s just doing a great job of notifying you of a dangerous issue. If you are really lucky, this problem is only just emerging. But the reality is, you are more likely to have been using your passwords on websites that have long been hacked and leaked a lot of sensitive information.

Next, most people who firmly claim that widgets are dangerous things believe themselves right because their phones slow down suspiciously when they install widgets.

They don’t just install widgets. They just installed iOS 14, then installed a third-party widget, or added one of the Apple widgets to the homescreen.

The bottom line here is iOS 14. Any OS update is a big difference, and initially, it will slow down your device because of reorganizing the serving indexes. search function. Bookmarks are things that when you want to launch an app, iOS uses them to see where the app is located and to open it instantly.

People who think dangerous widgets must have assumed that someone was recording your keystrokes in such an obvious way that it slowed down the phone clearly. Many people are so scared that they completely erase all data on the iPhone and start over from scratch.

By doing this, your iPhone will be faster. Anyway, your iPhone will be faster if you have a little patience, and wiping the iPhone makes it faster because there are no apps left for the system to index, because there is nothing to search for?

Everyone wants widgets to be more interactive, to be something more sublime than just a super big icon of the main app, but they won’t. At least for the time being, they can’t do those things.

Reference: AppleInsider