Privacy

32482 readers

396 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

143

Keyboard spyware? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by vis4valentine@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

68 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I was taking a look at the Naomi Wu situation (A Chinese DIY tech youtuber who went missing after being watched by the government) and in one part they mentioned that she was concerned about her privacy, so started using Signal, but had a default chinese keyboard that had a keylogger and the police had looked into what she was talking on there.

I'm not sure if it was a mobile only thing, but it was mentioned that the keyboard app was used in like 70% por chinese smarthphones.

Now, I use AnySoftKey and refuse to use default keyboard apps, but how far can we reach on the keyboard security thing? Is typing on a computer or using a physical keyboard on a mobile device 100% safe? I think the keyboard issue is often overlooked and would like to know what recommendations your have? Or what should be known more?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Asudox@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I used to use Gboard with a firewall that isolates the app so that it can never connect to the internet. Though that was in the past and I'm not sure if that is even effective. So I just switched to a open source keyboard in FDroid

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Removing network permissions from the keyboard! I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned this. Great idea

[–] maynarkh@feddit.nl 17 points 1 year ago

This sentence kinda highlights how outlandishly dystopic the whole thing is.

[–] Asudox@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I used RethinkDNS's Firewall. It's pretty good.

[–] ReversedCookie@feddit.de 9 points 1 year ago

Apps can communicate with each other even without Internet access, this mean GBoard could just connect to Google Play Services or any other Google User/System App and share the data over that way.

[–] Zuberi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago

This will 100% still share everything you type with Google