when using closed-source software, always assume it's phoning home any chance it gets.
just so i understand that right, do you want your keyboard to spell check words as you type? if yes, i use openboard.
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
26 points (100.0% liked)
Privacy
32111 readers
693 users here now
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.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Interesting, it doesn't "spell check", but it does suggest words from its own dictionary for predictive text. Maybe I don't need the checking if I can just look at predicted spellings. Thanks for the thought.
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
Thanks! Good to know
You can disable network access. Only thing that breaks is the GIF selector, among anything else that needs access to the internet. That's what I do.
Yeah I have to admit I am using gboard. Although, I do have the network turned off for the application, so functionalities like built in gif search and google translate don't work. If you don't find a keyboard you like and want to try out gboard this would be the most private way. I mean I feel like you shouldn't allow network to any keyboard app even if it's audited and open source, it really has no reason to phone home.
Definitely agree
AnySoftKeyboard comes with a spell checker with customizable aggressiveness and dictionary.
Thanks! It does work for predictive text and correcting while typing, but doesn't check for misspellings in typed text. Probably good enough
The spell checker uses a local dictionary. There are other things that it phones home for. IIRC, voice to text is one of them.