Over the past week or so, some SwiftKey users reported that their keyboards were suggesting random foreign words and even unfamiliar e-mail addresses. Over the weekend, SwiftKey has responded to these worrying reports, and have stated that they will be disabling its cloud sync service until the issue is resolved.
Knowledge of this problem first appeared in a reddit thread where a user reported that SwiftKey has been suggesting German words when he has never typed in German before. Things get really troubling when SwiftKey suggested an e-mail address that the user has never seen before. Going through the thread, it appears that this issue isn’t limited to just one person as a handful of people in the thread commented that they’ve been receiving weird word predictions for a while.
According to SwiftKey, this issue is limited to only a small fraction of users. The source of the problem appears to be a bug in the keyboard’s synchronization program, a problem that the company states “does not pose a security issue for our customers.” However, SwiftKey has since disabled cloud sync and the company has said that it will be removing e-mail address predictions, meaning that should this happen again, email addresses won’t be suggested to a complete stranger.
Source: SwiftKey, Reddit, Android Authority
