Swiftkey is a popular proprietary virtual keyboard on both the Android and iOS platforms. The company claims to have over 300 million users. Swiftkey was purchased by Microsoft for $250 million in February 2016.
Swiftkey makes use of advanced machine learning technology to predict the next word that the user intends to type. Swiftkey requires access to private correspondence - SMS and other typed messages. Swiftkey analyzes the text and syncs the collected information to provide a customized and more efficient typing experience.
Such a convenient tool requires mountains of user data in order to be effective,
said data is stored in the 'cloud. Unfortunately there appear to be leaks in the storage protocol:
https://blog.swiftkey.com/important-information-relating-to-the-status-of-our-sync-services/"This week, a few of our customers noticed unexpected predictions where unfamiliar terms, and in some rare cases emails, appeared when using their mobile phone. We are working quickly to resolve this inconvenience.
While this did not pose a security issue for our customers, we have turned off the cloud sync service and have updated our applications to remove email address predictions. During this time, it will not be possible to back up your SwiftKey language model."
Swiftkey users have claimed that the app is leaking vital user information such as emails and phone numbers to other users.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/4u5b7d/holy_fk_swiftkey_is_giving_me_someone_elses/
0 comments:
Post a Comment