The mobile keyboard app company SwiftKey says that it is "working quickly" to fix an issue that was causing some users to see phones numbers and email addresses from strangers.
Earlier this week, online reports posted on Reddit and elsewhere stated that unknown email addresses and phone numbers were showing up in some users' SwiftKey predictions. The company, which was acquired by Microsoft a few months ago, has now addressed those reports in a blog post:
This week, a few of our customers noticed unexpected predictions where unfamiliar terms, and in some rare cases emails, appeared when using their mobile phone. We are working quickly to resolve this inconvenience. While this did not pose a security issue for our customers, we have turned off the cloud sync service and are updating our applications to remove email address predictions. During this time, it will not be possible to back up your SwiftKey language model.
The vast majority of SwiftKey users are not affected by this issue. If you have any reason to believe you are seeing unfamiliar predictions, please contact reviews@swiftkey.com. We take users' privacy and security very seriously and are committed to maintaining world-class standards for our community.
SwiftKey says it will continue to offer updates on this situation on its blog site.
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Reader comments
SwiftKey is 'working quickly' to address bug that causes predictions to show for the wrong account
I've been running the SwiftKey beta over a year, and haven't seen this bug. I use SwiftKey as my default keyboard and have deleted the stock keyboard.
I love SwiftKey, but it's predictions have gotten worse for me the last month or so. It used to be spot on but now is accurate only about 30% of the time. Hope they get it back together soon!
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Lately I have noticed that it predicted some weird words here and there. Not too bad though.
I love SwiftKey, I'm using it over two years now as my default keyboard, its flow feature is simply amazing, I mostly type on Croatian language and it's predictions are superb. I wish they would improve its stability on iOS. It is much more stable on my other device (LG G3) where it never switches to the stock keyboard, on iOS it's happening a few times daily that it automatically switches to the stock keyboard or doesn't appear at all.. :(
Did you remove the normal Apple Keyboard from the keyboard list? That should stop it appearing except on password fields, that's a security feature of iOS
I just downloaded it again and can't log in via Google or Facebook due to cloud issues.
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This issue has been fixed in the SwiftKey beta. The App Store version soon to follow. Emails and numbers are now a go in beta.