Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Does Gboard spell checker phone home on Android? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 10 months ago by Slatlun@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I assumed that Gboard spell checker contacted servers constantly and have it switched off for whatever good that does. I recently tried enabling it to play with other options and noticed that it works when my phone is entirely offline.

Does anyone know if it works locally or does it just send a bunch of data out once I give it internet access again?

Bonus question: Does anyone know of a privacy respecting spell checker for android? It looks like Florisboard can work with Hunspell through Nuspell but not on Android. Is that right?

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[–] slock@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It does, don't remember the details but at one point I let a packet capture tool on my phone run for a few days and checked which apps phoned home. Gboard was one of them. You'd besurprisesd at the amount of network traffic for most apps between 2-4 am.

Just remove its network permissions, and it works fine (without the phoning home part) AFAIK other spell checkers / autocomplete aren't quite there yet

[–] Slatlun@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 months ago

Thanks! Good to know