Some Users Find Swype Keyboard App Makes 4000+ Location Requests Per Day

New submitter postglock (917809) writes "Swype is a popular third-party keyboard for Android phones (and also available for Windows phones and other platforms). It's currently the second-most-popular paid keyboard in Google Play (behind SwiftKey), and the 17th highest of all paid apps. Recently, users have discovered that it's been accessing location data extremely frequently, making almost 4000 requests per day, or 2.5 requests per minute. The developers claim that this is to facilitate implementation of 'regional dialects,' but cannot explain why such frequent polling is required, or why this still occurs if the regional function is disabled. Some custom ROMs such as Cyanogenmod can block this tracking, but most users would be unaware that such tracking is even occurring." Readers in the linked thread don't all seem to see the same thing; if you are a Swype user, do you see thousands of location requests, none, or something in between?

Comments

Onr reason more to not use it

[houghi]

If anytime, they should only do that when I launch it the first time. And otherwise, it should look at the setings my phone is using and ONLy as a way to sufets what you want, not to set it.

Mind you, they are not the only ones who think language and location are related. Among others, Google does this too. It does not look at my browser settings (which are in English) but instead guesses from my IP what language I should prefer. I live in Belgium aand guessing the language by location is wrong a LOT of the times.

There is a reason why my browser setting is in English. That is because I WANT it in English. And just because I visit my parents in Spain or my sister in Germany or friends in the USofA does not mean there is any change in preferece in my language.

To me it is broken by design.