There is a significant privacy concern came into the limelight a couple of days back. The popular keyboard app Swiftkey leaking users sensitive information to other users by mistake.
There are many keyboard apps available for Android users on Google Play Store. Among all of them, Swiftkey is the market leader. Recently Microsoft purchased the company.
The great feature of Swiftkey is word prediction (i.e. auto-suggestions). The app learns our word usage patterns and syncs those words we frequently use to our “user profile.” Next time when you are chatting with your friend on Whatsapp, immediately you finished typing a word, Swiftkey automatically displays the upcoming word predictions on the top bar.
It is a great feature on Swiftkey. No Android keyboard app predicts words in such an excellent manner. But the latest security finding indicates that there was a glitch in sync the word predictions across multiple devices.
Few users are reporting that they see others phone numbers and email messages while composing text with Swiftkey. SwiftKey admits the flaw and release statement as below:
“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 are updating our applications to remove email address predictions. During this time, it will not be possible to back up your SwiftKey language model.
The vast majority of SwiftKey users are not affected by this issue. If you have any reason to believe you are seeing unfamiliar predictions, please contact reviews@swiftkey.com.”