[billygoat]

Happy user of Proton Mail/Calendar/Drive.

Article doesn't mention the worst offender in my view: the default GBoard keyboard on my Android phone sends everything I type to Google -- and voice typing goes through their servers too. This is the default keyboard on a billion phones.

I've done tests where I text a friend using Signal and WhatsApp, E2E encrypted apps, and the default keyboard tracks every word. Mentioning how much my sister really loves her convertible BMW, and wondering if maybe I should buy a new convertible (this is LOL, I am a bicycle commuter) and within three minutes the auto ads start appearing relentlessly all over the internet and especially on Instagram!

This is not the thing where you just happen to notice it because you're looking for it -- literally 50% of the ads switched to car ads after I sent that message.

I can install a different keyboard from F-Droid, but how many people do that? And I lose voice typing even though it could be done on-phone. Sad.

[djmips]

That's quite the claim that GBoard keylogs. This has come up before and it is claimed that GBoard does not keylog and send data to Google. I feel like if it was really doing that it would be a huge controversy that everyone would know about.

[rpdillon]

It's weird. They have a privacy policy, and it's not great.

https://support.google.com/gboard/answer/12373137

> A technology called federated learning helps Gboard learn new words and phrases. Federated learning doesn’t send the text you speak or type to Google, but will send what it learns to Google, where it will be combined with learnings from other users to create better speech and typing models.

I had heard elsewhere that Samsung really was collecting everything typed on their keyboard. I did a couple minutes of research just now: doesn't seem totally outlandish. Under "information we collect":

> Samsung Keyboard information: The words that you type when you enable Predictive text. This feature may be offered in connection with your Samsung account to synchronize the data for use on your other Samsung mobile devices. You can clear the data by going to the Predictive text settings.

https://www.samsung.com/levant/info/privacy/

[livueta]

Something I've wondered about, because it seems like you might have run across this in your testing: does the default keyboard get anything if it's present on the system, but not the currently active keyboard? I enjoy FlorisBoard for English input, but I've had a hard time finding a quality replacement for Gboard's Japanese input mode.

[ZephyrOhm]

What's the keyboard you use from F-Droid. I've never found a decent replacement for Gboard and would absolutely love one

[hnarn]

> I've done tests where I text a friend using Signal and WhatsApp, E2E encrypted apps, and the default keyboard tracks every word.

Prove it. Seeing targeted ads is not proof.

[Nugget0]

What keyboard have you switched to?

[billygoat]

I have experimented with "Simple Keyboard Simply" and "SayBoard", both available on F-Droid. I don't love either of them.

On the Signal App, you can request the incognito keyboard mode, and my tests show that GBoard does respect that setting. But that's just for the one app.

[1] Simple Keyboard https://f-droid.org/packages/rkr.simplekeyboard.inputmethod/

[2] SayBoard https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.elishaazaria.sayboard/