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posted by janrinok on Friday December 08 2017, @09:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the all-your-data-are-belong-to-us dept.

Although I have two Android phones, I occasionally get flack because I don't use them as phones, nor for email, nor anything I prefer to keep private, and here's a great example of why:

Personal data belonging to over 31 million customers of a popular virtual keyboard app has leaked online, after the app's developer failed to secure the database's server.

The server is owned by Eitan Fitusi, co-founder of AI.type, a customizable and personalizable on-screen keyboard, which boasts more than 40 million users across the world.

But the server wasn't protected with a password, allowing anyone to access the company's database of user records, totaling more than 577 gigabytes of sensitive data.

The database appears to only contain records on the app's Android users.

Additional coverage on ZDNet and RT


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  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday December 09 2017, @04:16PM

    by RamiK (1813) on Saturday December 09 2017, @04:16PM (#607707)

    1. Because they're training an AI on it and don't want the results to be accessible to their competitors.
    2. A little while ago I've read a few comments here about how Apple's auto-completion capitalizes "IT" in the middle of sentences when people just want to write "it" resulting in them having to constantly backspace to fix it. I'm guessing it's the sort of rules that forms when you're not sending every user's keystroke.

    Once SoCs start supporting neural nets it might become possible to share formed rules over a p2p network. But the keyboard app will need permission to the contacts and password store to black-list the auto-completion of passwords names and addresses. And even then most people will likely need to manually go over the rules and black-list stuff.

    Personally, I disabled auto-completion and only used the default Android keyboard or Hacker's Keyboard on the day I bought my first smartphone.

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