Does Gboard spell checker phone home on Android?

I assumed that Gboard spell checker contacted servers constantly and have it switched off for whatever good that does. I recently tried enabling it to play with other options and noticed that it works when my phone is entirely offline.

Does anyone know if it works locally or does it just send a bunch of data out once I give it internet access again?

Bonus question: Does anyone know of a privacy respecting spell checker for android? It looks like Florisboard can work with Hunspell through Nuspell but not on Android. Is that right?

slock,

It does, don’t remember the details but at one point I let a packet capture tool on my phone run for a few days and checked which apps phoned home. Gboard was one of them. You’d besurprisesd at the amount of network traffic for most apps between 2-4 am.

Just remove its network permissions, and it works fine (without the phoning home part) AFAIK other spell checkers / autocomplete aren’t quite there yet

Slatlun,

Thanks! Good to know

hperrin,

The spell checker uses a local dictionary. There are other things that it phones home for. IIRC, voice to text is one of them.

glowie,
@glowie@h4x0r.host avatar

You can disable network access. Only thing that breaks is the GIF selector, among anything else that needs access to the internet. That’s what I do.

pineapplelover,

Yeah I have to admit I am using gboard. Although, I do have the network turned off for the application, so functionalities like built in gif search and google translate don’t work. If you don’t find a keyboard you like and want to try out gboard this would be the most private way. I mean I feel like you shouldn’t allow network to any keyboard app even if it’s audited and open source, it really has no reason to phone home.

Slatlun,

Definitely agree

KpntAutismus,

when using closed-source software, always assume it’s phoning home any chance it gets.

just so i understand that right, do you want your keyboard to spell check words as you type? if yes, i use openboard.

Slatlun,

Interesting, it doesn’t “spell check”, but it does suggest words from its own dictionary for predictive text. Maybe I don’t need the checking if I can just look at predicted spellings. Thanks for the thought.

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