Privacy with Google's Gboard

noob@lemm.ee to Android@lemdro.id – 242 points –

The only app I can't live without. Except for gboard, all of my applications are Foss. There is no competition for gboard's swipe typing, not to mention its many capabilities like as searching for gifs, stickers, being able to paste copied images, translating, and so on. I'd like to know how I can use gboard while maintaining my privacy. According to what I've heard, it sends all typing data to Google's server. If you ask me, that's a massive no-no. Do you have any suggestions?

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Give OpenBoard with gesture typing a shot. No gifs and stuff, but gesture typing works together with suggestions, unlike either base OB or Floris. Someone casually mentioned it a few weeks ago and damn how much my life changed.

I'm so thrilled right now! I'm already typing this reply on OpenBoard and I'm loving it.

Gboard was also a big hurdle to my need to degoogle my phone. But not anymore!

Thank you so much. You've brighten my day. I'm both happy for knowing this and for finding about it on the fediverse.

I just wanted to say how much I appreciate this whole vibe!

BTW that still uses Google's proprietary gesture typing library internally: https://github.com/wordmage/openboard/commit/46fdf2b550035ca69299ce312fa158e7ade36967

There's still no good FOSS alternative to Google's library though so it is what it is.

Aha, that's why it's not on F-Droid. That makes sense.

Still, it doesn't connect to the internet so unless there's something very sneaky Google does in the background, it should be good?

Floris Board afaik has its own implementation of gesture typing, but that's been stuck in beta without word suggestions, so it's not really usable.

Wow, this is an awesome keyboard! I love the pointer moving with the spacebar.

I can live with no gifs, but I can't live without emoji support :/

It has regular emojis

Weird I'm not seeing any options for emojis anywhere on the keyboard using S23 Ultra

If you long press the comma key on the left of the spacebar, you'll see an emoji icon on the far right.

Long press the enter/return button (round, with an left point arrow). It'll show you the emoji and clipboard buttons. πŸ’‘

Alternatively, you can turn on the dedicated emoji button on OpenBoard's preferences.

You can also long press the comma button. There you'll find the preferences and emoji buttons.

Maybe you have the key disabled, look in settings under preferences. There's a bunch of stuff you might want to tweak.

Thanks for sharing. I've finally replaced Gboard. Now I have to adjust to the new key sizes, but at least I know my data is private

You can resize it in settings, at least the height. I have mine set to 80%. Before OB I was using GB and I recall setting it so both looked the same.

That's impressive thank you. Gesture typing with it now.

How do you gesture type with it? Slide doesn't work for me and there's no option to enable it.

You have to go to the settings and turn gestures on. Also this is not the fdroid version. This is the version from the link above.

I'm glad the word is spreading, i also found out a few weeks ago through Lemmy. The only bug that drives me up the wall is when trying to delete backwards to fix a word. It eventually eats the space to the PREVIOUS word, joining them together and making an even bigger mess. It also looks like it never got an update after September :(

I guess you're using Jerboa? Apparently that's a bug between WebView Webkit and the AOSP keyboard (which OB is based on), or something... I don't quite get what's going on...

It actually happens on any window or app I've used, maybe they're all webview instances... Dunnow.

VoilΓ  ! My first great piece of advice found on Lemmy! So thankful for this, and for witnessing the sudden growth of a great community here on Lemmy <3

Thanks! The only thing I don't like is that I can't have arrow keys. It's immediately better than SwiftKey for sure, so I'll adjust.

You can use swiping on the space bar to move left and right at least.

AnySoftKeyboard has arrow keys and more gestures, but it's not as refined overall imo.

Floris Board has gestures to move around IIRC, but not at the same time as gesture typing, and is lacking word suggestions.

Awesome! Using space to go left and right is good enough for me!

Thanks a ton for that. I got to really liking OpenBoard since I started using it.

I've been looking for something like this for so long, thank you!

What GBoard and SwiftKey can so far collect from a user is written in this PDF : https://github.com/kamilprz/android-keyboard-privacy/blob/main/report.pdf

Damn, Swiftkey sends the typed text even in Incognito mode... 😱

Where does it say that? The abstract explicitly says that neither gboard or swiftkey collect or share the input content or frequency of specific characters entered.

Does it say differently in the actual paper?

The post title contradicts the abstract. Gboard does not transmit the content "only" telemetry data.

GBoard learning algorithm has been federated since 2017 πŸ€·β€β™‚οΈ edit

https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html

That's actually pretty cool

It works like this: your device downloads the current model, improves it by learning from data on your phone, and then summarizes the changes as a small focused update. Only this update to the model is sent to the cloud, using encrypted communication, where it is immediately averaged with other user updates to improve the shared model. All the training data remains on your device, and no individual updates are stored in the cloud.

My main deal breaker with most open source keyboards is the usually pretty bad multi language support. I type in three languages all the time and don't want to have to switch keyboards every time I switch the language. Currently using SwiftKey, just because it handles multi-language (fairly) well.

There is a fork of openboard with multiple language support, but it's missing glide typing. When these two features are merged it's the perfect keyboard. Until then the language switch icon works well enough.

You mean it can auto recognize the language you're using?

Same. Gboard is the only software keyboard capable of multi-language input that "just works". I tried OpenBoard, AOSP, Floris, Anysoft and while they seem okay in general, none supports polyglots as well as Gboard

If you're on calyxos, grapheneos, or lineageos you can disable network permisions for that app. If not, use netguard as a firewall and block it.

https://f-droid.org/packages/eu.faircode.netguard/

If you have Google play services the keyboard could phone home through play services. Shutting off network access isn't 100% effective, especially for Google apps.

Obviously depending on your threat model this is fine.

If you are using Graphene, Play Services are themselves sandboxed and running as a user app with no privileges. I think they really can't be accessed on graphene, unless specifically choosing to.

I have a limited understanding. But I believe in graphene the Google Play services are available in the user account that is running the Google Play services. So if you have a Google keyboard running as your main user and you have Google Play services running in your main user account they can talk to each other. That's how apps like signal could use Google Play services for message detection.

But if you have a work account and a personal account and Google Play is only in the work account. The personal account cant cross talk to it.

I believe some custom ROMs use an AOSP version that is very simplified, but it’s not a 1:1 replacement. I’ll be following this to see if anybody has suggestions.

F-Droid has a lot of security issues(if you care about security), use Neo Store if you want access to F-Droid apps with a more secure app.

EDIT: Even better to use Obtainium and add the links of the APP's own Github/GitLab repo to it.

Any chance u can explain how Neo Store is more secure?

iirc fdroid utilizes very old api which is problematic as newer api gets newer security features droidify and neostore both are more modern

Neo Store can enable automatic updates for apps downloaded from F-Droid.

And how does that make it more secure?

I don't think it would make F-Droid itself more secure, but it's best to get possible security updates for apps sooner with auto-updates.

I read through that article, and though I don't have the time or knowledge to properly critique it, I found quite a lot of it unconvincing.

It's one thing to agree there are potential issues, but the article seemed to jump a bit too easily, via rhetoric more than logic, to "therefore it's unsuitable" and similarly to "the other ones are better".

(Disclaimer: I only know mildly what I'm talking about!! If whoever reads this is interested, I hope you can follow the details to their source and get involved in the proper discussion for improving f-droid and/or encouraging another respiratory client.)

A tempting idea would be to compare F-Droid to the desktop Linux model where users trust their distribution maintainers out-of-the-box (this can be sane if you’re already trusting the OS anyway), but the desktop platform is intrinsically chaotic and heterogeneous for better and for worse. It really shouldn’t be compared to the Android platform in any way.

This is, quite frankly, borderline misinformation. Malicious packages in Linux distributions are unheard of. Malicious apps in the allegedly-more-secure Google Play, on the other hand, are a dime a dozen.

The downplaying of the importance of reproducible builds further diminishes my opinion of this piece.

I'm going to go ahead and continue using F-Droid, thanks.

A tempting idea would be to compare F-Droid to the desktop Linux model where users trust their distribution maintainers out-of-the-box (this can be sane if you’re already trusting the OS anyway), but the desktop platform is intrinsically chaotic and heterogeneous for better and for worse. It really shouldn’t be compared to the Android platform in any way.

This is, quite frankly, borderline misinformation. Malicious packages in Linux distributions are unheard of. Malicious apps in the allegedly-more-secure Google Play, on the other hand, are a dime a dozen.

The downplaying of the importance of reproducible builds further diminishes my opinion of this piece.

I'm going to go ahead and continue using F-Droid, thanks.

What exactly are you trying to point out ?

From your quote: "It really shouldn’t be compared to the Android platform in any way."

And where exactly does it downplay reproducible builds ? "reproducible builds are not as common as we would have wanted."

"I'm going to go ahead and continue using F-Droid, thanks." Good friend, do whatever it is you want to do.

I'm just trying to spread security awareness.

EDIT: "Saying Play Store is filled with malicious apps is beyond the point: the false sense of security is a real issue. Users should not think of the F-Droid main repository as free of malicious apps, yet unfortunately many are inclined to believe this."

From your quote: β€œIt really shouldn’t be compared to the Android platform in any way.”

I quoted that because it's part of the borderline misinformation. Security is security. Malware is malware. Android isn't magical and neither is desktop Linux. They absolutely can be meaningfully compared.

And where exactly does it downplay reproducible builds ? β€œreproducible builds are not as common as we would have wanted.”

Ah, you're right. I misread that part, sorry.

I’m just trying to spread security awareness.

So am I. I'm an ornery old Linux nerd and security snob. I'd excise all proprietary software from my home and office if I could, precisely because it has such an appalling track record and the blatantly unnecessary attack surfaces of DRM and telemetry.

Can F-Droid be more secure than it is? Sure. Do the issues described in this paper mean F-Droid is so rampantly insecure that even Play is safer? Absolutely not.

By the way, I'm not sure I understand how Neo Store is supposed to be more secure, as it's supposedly just an alternative UI for F-Droid. As for Obtainium, it'll protect you from malfeasance or compromise on the part of the F-Droid repository, but it won't protect you from malicious app developers, and unless I'm mistaken, the latter is a much more common threat.

"I quoted that because it's part of the borderline misinformation. Security is security. Malware is malware. Android isn't magical and neither is desktop Linux. They absolutely can be meaningfully compared."

That's why the author said it's tempting. You cannot compare desktop Linux to Android. Android is light-years ahead in terms of security than desktop Linux will ever be.

If you install Debian on your machine then that means you trust the Debian developers. If you trust the Debian developers then that means that you trust their repositories. The same cannot be said about Android. If you, for example, install GrapheneOS you're trusting the graphene developers for the OS and the individual developers for their individual apps you install on your phone.

On Android a compromised user doesn't have root, on ordinary Linux desktops, a compromised non-root user with access to sudo is equal to a full root compromise. On a Linux desktop with Xorg you can easily keylog everything with one malicious app(that app automatically gets these permissions without prompting you), with modern Android that's not even an option(you'd need to accept all of these invasive permissions yourself, unless the app has a zero day that can bypass permissions).

The list goes on and on and on. You can read more here

"Ah, you're right. I misread that part, sorry."

No biggie :D

"By the way, I'm not sure I understand how Neo Store is supposed to be more secure, as it's supposedly just an alternative UI for F-Droid."

Neo store has the highest target SDK currently so it can use security and privacy APIs that Android provides with each new version. That alone is one of the biggest reasons to use neo store over native F-Droid. It shows you the target SDK, permissions (Way more understandable than whatever F-Droid does) & trackers for the apps you want to install. So you can make a more informed decision if you want that app installed.

"As for Obtainium, it'll protect you from malfeasance or compromise on the part of the F-Droid repository, but it won't protect you from malicious app developers, and unless I'm mistaken, the latter is a much more common threat."

You are adding more attack surface when using F-Droid, but when using Obtainium, you have one less attack surface. Instead of worrying about malicious F-Droid developers and malicious app developers, you only worry about the latter. Malicious app developers can still publish to F-Droid without F-Droid getting compromised.

To those who have been recommending Florisboard in this thread: Thank you. I've longed for a good FOSS keyboard, but always found they lacked enough features that I was willing to compromise and stick with gboard. Florisboard, using the latest beta from IzzyOnDroid, absolutely hits the mark already. It's missing a few features, like word autosuggest, but I can live without that for a while.

I use OpenBoard from F-Droid.

I use a fork of OpenBoard with Swipe Typing libraries added to it.

Any idea why that isn't in F-Droid?

I'm not sure, that's a question for the Dev.

Some of the reason may be the hastle of rebranding, having two Openboards would be confusing so the fork would need to change names and icons and such. Some of it is also be this is for personal use, and we happen to find it, so they may not be interested in the expectation of maintaining it beyond their own useage. Some of it may be this is good enough, Openboard's release cycle is pretty slow so the fork doesn't need to be updated and released often, so an APK on Github downloaded twice a year is good enohgh for them.

FOSS is not just about privacy! Freedom is that important reason you should care about. FlorisBoard is my suggestion for you.

Yesterday I installed Grapheneos so I've swapped to florisboard. Not bad but it's very specific on where you swipe using gestures. I'm slowly getting used to it but gboard was a lot more forgiving.

Try OpenBoard with gesture typing

The latest release being almost a year ago doesn't exactly inspire confidence though.

Why is everyone obsessed with constant updates? It's not broken, there's nothing to fix. It's a keyboard, I prefer it to be fast, reliable and not phone home.

I don't need some bloated mess that will take 10 seconds to start and require a gigabyte of RAM because the devs need to push an update every week with new useless crap without testing it.

Regular updates doesn't mean, new features all the time. It mostly means security updates, which are important.

It doesn't have internet accesss. There isn't much to worry about.

Ed: I understand that non-internet apps can be used for attacks as well, but maybe there just hasn't been anything to update.

There are active forks, it might take some time until a successor is found that includes all MRs.

Ok I'm f-droiding right now :)
edit :just realized it's different than the one you linked.
further edit: It's much better than floris. Happy days, thank you for the suggestion.

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If you're on graphene OS then just uninstall GBoard and when youre installing it back uncheck the network permission checkbox. Easy as pie

No need to uninstall. Just go into Settings - Apps - Gboard - Permissions. You can deny or grant any perms (including Network) there.

If you're on GrapheneOS, you get the option to block an app's network access when you install it. So you can use whatever keyboard you want and it can't call home.

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Tried it for a few minutes, it just feels off. It could just be the haptics? Idk this makes sense it just really makes me aware I'm typing on a screen

I do like FlorisBoard but japanese support is lacking it seems and as a learner, it made me have to go toward Gboard. Granted I am able to put GBoard behind a firewall and cut off it's network connectivity.

Used FlorisBoard for a good while, it's the perfect replacement imo. I don't remember exactly but there was a certain feature missing for me so I uninstalled it but it may have been implemented by now.

The major feature that's missing is autocorrect, rely on it a lot

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What do you mean, no competition? SwiftKey was the first to have swipe typing, and still does it best, because it learns how you swipe and adjusts itself for that.

Swype was the first to have it. It did so amazingly well and was better than SwiftKey while it was still around.

Oh shit you're right! I forgot all about Swype. I used that too, back in the day.

I loved Swype. Nuance made it a pile of shit though. One annoying thing after they bought it was that 'K.' would always autocorrect to K. d. Lang. You could not tell it to stop doing that.

I use SwiftKey now. Microsoft is getting more of my data.

I never ran into that issue, but it might be because I write okay!

I don't know how much of a difference it makes in terms of Gboard phoning home, but you can disable a bunch of data sharing options in the Privacy section of Gboard's settings:

maybe using a firewall to block it's internet access?

Any suggestions on how to bead in on it's connections?

I'd expect it to use some QUIC type protocol reaching out to one of the generic Google shortcutted domains, but that's 100% speculation and 0% testing.

Searching has brought up pcapdroid (it's on fdroid) as a way to watch network traffic from apps via local vpn. I only just installed it myself though so you know as much as I do at this point.

Leaving this up because there are some good discussions here already and it's a great question. I'd just flag rule 2 in the sidebar and that we ask questions and recommendation requests to be posted in !askandroid@lemdro.id instead. Thanks!

Off topic question, don't you guys think splintering the Android community into multiple communities specifically for certain things when there are so few people on the Lemmy platform will lead to the instance becoming driy without content? Not sure if there's been discussion about this yet.

Lemmy unfortunately doesn't currently have functionality that could help people curate the type of content they want to see from within a single community (e.g., hiding posts, filtering by tags). Maintaining separate communities is more work for the moderators but gives people the choice to decide what kind of content to subscribe to when populating their "Subscribed" view.

Our hope is to foster a space that's scratches the r/android itch with !android@lemdro.id, while also having a space set aside for questions, support, and seeking recommendations with !askandroid@lemdro.id. There's also a tendency toward better quality responses for the latter when it's in a community of people who have deliberately subscribed because they like to help folks out. That's the thinking at least.

Do feel free to join us on the Matrix chat anytime! https://matrix.to/#/#lemdro.id:matrix.org

A lot oft ROMs allow you go completely disable Internet access for a certain app. Disabling the data collection toggles in GBoard and disabling internet access for GBoard, Play Services, Play Store and the Google App should prevent most logging.

Does Lineage allow this? It's the rom I'm considering for my Galaxy Note 10

Sorry for the late reply but yes, this works on Lineage, one of the reasons I'm using it!

I always see people recommend FlorisBoard, but I haven't been able to leave OpenBoard for it on the basis of never getting autocorrect to work on FlorisBoard. Is that implemented and I'm not setting it up right, or do you all manage to text with 100% accuracy?

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What's wrong with this?

I've been using it for a couple weeks, and it's a lot slower than gboard. No swiping support, suggestions aren't as refined, and basically impossible to use one handed.

It does have swiping though. It's ripped straight put of gboard.

The version I'm using (from f-droid repo) does not have swiping. You might have a fork? Someone mentioned that elsewhere in the comments, I was not aware it existed.

For me, I use the clipboard a lot and having to hit that clipboard icon at the top right of the keyboard every time I want to paste something really adds up imo. I wish the last copied string would be in the suggested words bar like other keyboards.

On my old phone i used Florisboard, it was pretty good and it's FOSS as well.

These days I use the samsung keyboard as I recently switched to a samsung device. The keyboard customizations are really awesome, if you have KeysCafe module installed. Not sure how privacy friendly it is tho.

Not at all. And if you don't grant it contacts permission, it will keep asking. Every. Damn. Time.

OpenBoard, Florisboard, AnySoftKeyboard

THERE ARE ALTERNATIVES, PEOPLE!

I installed all three.

OpenBoard has no swiping support at all.

AnySoftKeyboard is glitchy, moving the cursor around unexpectedly and inserting spurious characters.

FlorisBoard's swiping is very inaccurate, to the point that it's barely faster than typing characters one-by-one.

I hope this situation improves soon…

I dropped gboard and started using FlorisBoard. It's a lot more crude and don't have the same features, but I'm very happy with it and will not go back.

I preffer my privacy over features, and using the software and reporting feedback helps it betting better.

We really need to ditch Google.

Since nobody has suggested it, I'm adding AnySoft Keyboard to the list of alternatives. It takes some time to train custom words but after that it's actually quite nice. Even the swipe typing works quite well. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.menny.android.anysoftkeyboard/

Just installed it. Swipe typing seems to sort of work, although it's even less accurate than Gboard. Still, I think I'll keep it, at least for a while.

I do wish for a physical keyboard, though… Wouldn't need gesture recognition then.

This is not a direct solution to your question. The only available option currently is Florisboard. I tried it but it didn't work well for me. Ever since I've justbeen using openboard. Clean, fast, pretty accurate but no glide typing. There is an open issue for it and some POC work had been done but not merged into main.

Florisboard is what im currently using and its still missing spelling corrections and suggestions which makes it really hard to reccomend. Besides that i really like it. Make sure you go into the haptic settings and turn off "vibrate motor directly", the system haptics for most devices is much better than the mushy ones enabled by default.

I miss the days of Swiftkey and Swype. They abruptly got worse at some point before Gboard happened, and I still don't understand why

Been using SwiftKey for going on a decade now and haven't ever had any trouble or noticed it getting worse. What happened?

It's still my default keyboard, if there's something dodgy with it, I'd like to know.

Ya, I've been using it for a long time and don't think it's gotten worse.

Many years ago when I was using it heavily, it was extremely good. If I had to estimate, 80 or 90 percent of the time I got the exact word I desired when swiping. Very low rate of having to make corrections.

I don't know when exactly it changed. I think I may have upgraded to a newer phone and despite migrating the data successfully it just didn't "recognize me" anymore. Tried a couple keyboards before settling on Gboard, which was the most consistent (read: least frustrating) at that time, but still noticeably less accurate than Swiftkey.

I generally have automatic updates disabled, so it's entirely possible that a newer version on the old phone would've been bad too, but I don't think I thought of that at the time.

I've been using it for years and I haven't noticed if its gotten any worst. It did however get bought by Microsoft, so it sends quite a bit of information back to Microsoft, if it is allowed.

I dunno, i use Swype still, and it's fine for me. At worst, it can be a bit laggy on old devices

I have my VPN block it from accessing the Internet so no data gets transmitted. You'd lose some features, but it works.

I’ve tried a bunch and tbh haven’t found anything sufficiently good for my standards

I use stock Samsung keyboard and textra for messages. Textra has all the other features you love. Plus it is just a wonderful app that updates often and has SO MUCH customization, if that's your thing. I love it because I can give my boss and coworkers a certain color and then I only rarely text the wrong person.

Gonna try this out. Hmm. Seem OK. No floating, no one handed mode, no pinyin input though. Good start.

Eh, florisboard is better

It's only better for privacy. It's definitely still behind in features.

I'm going to partially take that back. I just realised I hadn't added Florisboard Beta in my Obtainium after switching to a new phone. We now have suggestions! I miss gif searching but, meh, I can live without that.

Edit: well, kinda. There's a PR waiting to introduce "proper" suggestions. Right now in the beta, there's a suggestions panel, but it doesn't appear to be using the dictionary yet.