SwiftKey Bug Leaked Email Addresses, Phone Numbers To Strangers (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader writes: After many users reported receiving predictions meant for other users, such as email addresses and phone numbers, SwiftKey has suspended part of its service. The service responsible for the bug was SwiftKey's cloud sync service. The Verge reports that one user, an English speaker, was getting someone else's German suggestions, while someone received NSFW porn search suggestions. The Telegraph also reports, "One SwiftKey user, who works in the legal profession and ask to remain anonymous, found out their details had been compromised when a stranger emailed them to say that a brand new phone had suggested their email address when logging into an account online. 'A few days ago, I received an email from a complete stranger asking if I had recently purchased and returned a particular model of mobile phone, adding that not one but two of my email addresses (one personal and one work address) were saved on the phone she had just bought as brand-new,' said the user." SwiftKey released an official statement today about the issue but said that it "did not pose a security issue."

Comments

That's not how SwiftKey works

[PatientZero]

I understand your concern, but SwiftKey does not send individual keystrokes over the wire, and prediction is handled on the device. It does send any new words you type so that it can predict the same words on all your devices. It goes way beyond T9 prediction and considers the context from preceding words. When I'm replying with a canned response, I can often type the first word and then simply hit the spacebar to insert each successive word.

SwiftKey builds your personal vocabulary by combining the dictionaries you choose at setup with the words you type in context. You can also have it (optionally) learn from existing emails, IMs, Facebook posts, etc. If you don't want the cloud features, turn them off. If you don't want it to scan your existing messages, click "Skip" when asked.

This is definitely a bug and a problem, but the feature itself is entirely optional and clearly presented. SwiftKey is definitely one of my favorite apps, and it has a crap ton of themes.