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SwiftKey responds to personal data leak mishap, suspends cloud sync to fix issue

By Milen Yanachkov

Published: Aug 01, 2016, 3:12 AM

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Android Apps

SwiftKey responds to personal data leak mishap, suspends cloud sync to fix issue

Last week we reported that a limited number of SwiftKey users on Android have been experiencing synchronization mash-ups and receiving other users' suggestions instead of their own. These reports were followed by a complete “sync outage” that barred SwiftKey users at large to access their typing data.

SwiftKey has since issued an official statement on the company's blog, confirming our suspicions that synchronization was disabled in order to resolve predictions mix-ups.

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 have updated 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.

We will continue to post further updates on our blog.

The SwiftKey Team

It's good to see SwiftKey finally acknowledge both issues, as at the time of our initial report on the matter, the company had only commented on the sync outage, pinning it on “service disruption with our personalization service.”

Have you experienced prediction mix-ups recently? If you have, leave us a comment down below.

source: SwiftKey Blog