Do not ever use any keyboard apps that are proprietary and/or require network permission. It doesn’t matter how great that auto-complete is, it’s very bad if it’s sending everything you type to a server somewhere just to be data mined. It doesn’t even matter if it has a “good” privacy policy or if you trust the creator, sending it away incurs the chance of being intercepted by a less trusted party.
Agree this is needed, if you want you could do a PR, on Github. Or just click the stylus on a page you want to edit. In my view, we could make it a separate category, but this would then need iOS keyboard recommendation
Chinese keyboards often offer “cloud-based” prediction services which transmit your keystrokes to a server that hosts more powerful prediction models. As many have previouslypointedout, this is a massive privacy tradeoff, as “cloud-based” keyboards and input methods can function as vectors for surveillance and essentially behave as keyloggers.
We demonstrate that the words a user types on their mobile handset, e.g. when sending text messages, can be recovered with high accuracy under a wide range of conditions and that counter-measures such a use of mini-batches and adding local noise are ineffective. We also show that the word order (and so the actual sentences typed) can be reconstructed with high fidelity. This raises obvious privacy concerns, particularly since GBoard is in production use.
The proposed mitigation of a character-based language model would be feasible. They’d still be able to recommend entire words though the process would rely on a beam search or similar to identify high-probability character sequences which match dictionary words. That said, I’m not sure the recommendation quality would remain the same using this approach.
Why not just use a big name keyboard like microsoft swiftkey and then just disable network access? You don’t even need netguard to do this since this feature is built into android itself these days.
I think people recommend HeliBoard to AnysoftKeyboard because it’s much easier to use, but having tested both, I find AnysoftKeyboard (much) too complete, that’s my theory.
The ability to disable network access for apps is not built into stock Android. It is, however, built into custom OS’s based on AOSP such as GrapheneOS, DivestOS and others.