11 ms·
Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day
- mariusz79 12y agoWe, as customers, are being raped by the corporations.. No dinner, no movies, no candles, no Vaseline. The sad thing is, many of the people here are part of the problem.
- minikites 12y agoA software bug is not on the same level as being violently sexually assaulted. You are part of a much larger problem.
- mariusz79 12y agoSoftware bug? Do you really believe that this is software bug? It logs location many thousands of times every day and nobody noticed that?
- gleenn 12y agoYour metaphor is pretty harsh but I agree with your sentiment. All these mobile apps need more granular security features, which Google almost released, and the EFF was dying for, but then Google quickly retracted it. Very unfortunate. A keyboard does not need to know your location. Nor do half of the damn apps in my phone. It should be easy to make your phone lie to the app and tell it where ever you want. Same with my contacts.
- Loughla 12y ago"A keyboard does not need to know your location. Nor do half of the damn apps in my phone. It should be easy to make your phone lie to the app and tell it where ever you want. Same with my contacts." Free app, good app, private app. Pick two; someone has to pay for the work.
- icebraining 12y agoSwype is paid.
- Loughla 12y agoYes, it is. And yet there are two Samsung phones in my home that come pre-loaded with it. Ergo, free. It honestly never dawned on me that someone would pay for Swype.
- icebraining 12y agoBy that logic, Windows and Mac OS X are also free. Swype is bundled, not free. You paid for it by buying the device; it's part of its features.
- brokentone 12y agoAt least Android provides the user the tools to audit this per app. Apple should follow suit.
- hadoukenio 12y agoDoes this mean we can't even trust the input options on a phone now? After blocking this, does it also mean I'm now going to have to change every password I've ever typed on my device? FFS.
- onli 12y agoIn fact, when activating a different input method on Android 2.3, there is a warning specific in that direction, that it does read everything you type, and therefore should only be changed if you trust the other keyboard. It is a valid warning. In fact, I don't think that we should trust our phones at all, not specifically but only including the input method.
- veeti 12y agoWhy did you start using Swype if you didn't trust them in the first place? Of course your keyboard can log everything you type.
- sikhnerd 12y agoEvery time I see something like this come up, it really makes me wonder how many other apps out there are doing the same thing and getting away with it. Unless you root your phone and use something like the mentioned android firewall, or go whole-hog and install Cyanogenmod, what chance do you have to guard against this? I assume ios users are likely in the same boat, but with even less chance of recourse.
- stingraycharles 12y agoNever attribute to malice what could also be attributed to incompetence. All we know is that it makes the location requests, it could just as well be attributed to sloppy programming.
- sz4kerto 12y agoDunno. How can you inadvertently request location info when you're implementing a keyboard for Android?
- mahouse 12y agoRead the thread and specifically the answer from one administrator of the board.
- matthewmacleod 12y agoWe check for last known location in order to provide regional dialects via Living Language. I'm not saying it's legit or required, but that's their explanation from the link there.
- tejaswiy 12y agoWhy don't they just use the current locale info ? Why assume their keyboard is extra special when the user is happy with how the rest of the system is setup?
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- userbinator 12y agoThe official response is that location data is used for "regional dialects"... makes sense, but is IP geolocation not close enough? The screenshot there doesn't make it clear but is this coarse or fine location data? My keyboard, no matter how smart, shouldn't need to know where exactly it is on Earth to within a few meters. Within a state or town, fair enough.
- AccountsBlow 12y agosorry but you only need to do this ONCE
- jnbiche 12y agoI think this is poor user UI. I mean, in this day in age when so many people travel through different countries weekly on pleasure or business, their keyboard layout changes accordingly? That doesn't make much sense.
- bentcorner 12y agoI don't think the keyboard changes UI - from the description it sounds like they augment the dictionary with words that other people near you are using in their vocabulary. Still, it doesn't make a lot of sense that they need to do that many location requests. Why should where I'm standing right now affect what words are in my dictionary? It's a poor proxy at best, the words that I use in my language are a product of both where I grew up and where I spend my time. Where I happen to be standing does not always matter that much. I wonder if bucketing users into "these people use the same words" would give better results?
- hrjet 12y ago> Why should where I'm standing right now affect what words are in my dictionary? Since Swype has do to a lot of inference from your gestures, it seems reasonable that it may perform better when inferring proper names with some location awareness. For example, if I am in a particular city, and wanted to type the name of a street where I am. I am not saying that's a feature I find compelling; it does sound reasonable though. Letting the user chose this behavior (and the permission), would be best.
- bananas 12y agoJust about everything I install on my phone is suspect these days with respect to privacy and permissions. Why does BBC weather need to write to my USB storage for example and why do I have to let it? The Nokia C2 I have floating around is starting to look interesting again. It has no idea where it is.
- Kiro 12y agoYes, BBC Weather. That's it. They are part of this mega anti-privacy NSA conspiracy too!
- gorhill 12y agoYou say this as if it is silly to ask why such an app needs write-access to the USB storage. Why do you think it is not a legitimate question?
- wcoenen 12y agoEvery functional phone knows where it is, in the sense that it knows the signal strength of one or more nearby cell towers. A java app on your Nokia C2 could probably determine its location like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11628648/how-to-find-user-location-using-cell-tower-in-j2me https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11628648/how-to-find-use...
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- DominikR 12y agoMaybe this is caused by using Google Play Services to get the location. The location tracking of Google Play Services is basically a black box, that tracks the users movement very accurately. It could be that we don't see the count of location requests Swype made, but instead the count of location requests Google Play Services makes.
- anondoge 12y agoI work at Nuance, the Engineering Managers joke about Privacy concerns and how it is not their problem to worry about. And they are facing a log collection crisis. ie their data centers are melting with logs.
- drzaiusapelord 12y agoIts also incredibly buggy. I've had it drain my battery randomly. On top of that, I noticed my maps application on my new N5 wasn't working correctly. It seemed to update once and then never again. I went into the location services and there was a EULA waiting for me to say yes to. Once I said yes, it worked, but wow, that's not how to do business. I should get that prompt in the maps app or when the phone boots up the first time. Digging through the menu system in settings is the only way I discovered this.
- DominikR 12y agoThe update dialog should also be displayed upon opening the Play Store app, but yes I agree. The user should be given the option to upgrade the moment an app requests a feature not provided by the current Google Play Services version.
- jgalt212 12y agoI have a Droid Moto X. Swype was pre-installed, so I can't even uninstall it without rooting my phone. I got an Android phone b/c I didn't want to be one of Steve's sheep, but given some of the comments here it's probably safer to be in his flock than not.
- dublinben 12y agoPerhaps you are thinking of Swiftkey. Swype is definitely not preinstalled on Moto X phones.
- itsameta4 12y agoRepublic Wireless has a deal with them.
- jgalt212 12y agoMaybe I misspoke, but are the Motorola Droid X and Moto X the same phone? If they are you may be mistaken per my experience (I cannot uninstall Swype, so I assume it was pre-installed) and per the wiki On June 16, 2010, Swype opened a public beta for the Android operating system.[20] The Samsung Galaxy S, Samsung Galaxy S II, Samsung Galaxy Note, Motorola Droid X, Motorola i1, and Motorola Droid 2 Android-based smartphones come with Swype pre-installed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swype http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swype
- dublinben 12y agoI think you did misspeak. The Motorola Droid X is a phone that came out in 2010. The Motorola Moto X is a phone that came out in 2013. There is no such phone as the "Droid Moto X."
- atoponce 12y agoThe Google keyboard supports swiping now, and if running 4.3, you can have the Dvorak layout as well.
- drdaeman 12y agoOfftopic: is Dvorak layout really useful on small touchscreens? I use it on hardware keyboard, where each finger has its place - and it's great. But all my attempts to use it on phone screen only led to increase of typos, because frequently used letters are too near to each other.
- atoponce 12y agoI love it. I find that a lot of the swiping motion stays on the home row. But, it is a lot of back-and-forth. It would be interesting to see a mobile keyboard designed with swiping such that frequently used letters are clustered together, and less frequently used letters further away. Meh. Having the Dvorak keyboard on my phone is also an awesome conversation piece. To each their own. :)
- hardwaresofton 12y agoI recently noticed swype was making my phone lag if I used it (I was using samsung's keyboard as an alternative, it has swype-like functionality), so I stopped using it, imagining something like this was the case. Couldn't understand why a typing app would every slow down -- glad my paranoia paid off
- talles 12y agoPardon my unawareness, but why would Swype get my location again?
- martincmartin 12y agoIt's explained in the post. To figure out the regional dialect.
- drzaiusapelord 12y agoSo if I'm on vacation in France, suddenly I get the French keyboard?
- codezero 12y agoNo, but it will be more likely to assume you are typing Rue Carnot rather than row boat if you are near that street, or the name of some nearby restaurant.
- blueblob 12y agoCould part of this be that "Privacy Guard" blocked the request, so Swype reissued requests?
- orbitingpluto 12y agoI'm showing 0 kb for Swype for mobile data usage, and I believe that was before I put it into full restricted mode for cellular. It could be phoning home later. Swype can toggle enabling/disabling cellular data, contribute usage data & "social integration". Also you shouldn't set up "backup and sync". My point is it looks like there is some setting where it is not phoning home all the time.
- thefreeman 12y agoActually, to me it sounds like a bug with Swype when location access is blocked. The users in the thread with the large amount of requests all have the location permission blocked. Other users with Privacy Guard installed as well (so they can see the amount of location requests) who have not blocked location access report that it only made the request once. So it just sounds like if it fails the initial request it continues to retry every few minutes. In my opinion it seems like a bug rather then anything malicious. However the posters in the thread do have a good point that there is really no reason for Swype to even need this permission.
- y4mi 12y agopossibly. but its every 20 seconds, not every few minutes… 4000 / 24 * 60 = 4000 / 1440 = 2.777 => 60 / 2.7 = 21 seconds
- DominikR 12y agoIf Swype tried to get your location every 20 seconds on purpose, it would drain you battery within a few hours.
- pdenya 12y agoIf it was successful it would drain your battery, failed attempts should cost almost nothing so this fits with the bug theory.
- DominikR 12y agoThat's exactly the point I'm trying to make. Accessing GPS every 20 secs just can't be what they had in mind when they implemented it. (not even in case it fails, because it would prevent the CPU from going into deep sleep, which saves battery) What I believe is happening: The developers of Swype didn't test for that error, because Google Play filters the app for all devices that don't have GPS, so the device is expected to have the hardware and to return some specific error in case it doesn't work (GPS turned off and so on) And the CyanogenMod privacy feature interferes in a way, that causes an unexpected error that they didn't account for. Combine that with the lack of an exponential backoff and you'll get this result.
- evanw 12y agoI found a similar issue with the Square Register app for Android. CyanogenMod's PrivacyGuard feature tells me it tried to access my location 22,000+ times in a 2-day period: https://twitter.com/evanw/status/453576355284660224/photo/1/large https://twitter.com/evanw/status/453576355284660224/photo/1/... I assumed this was a programming issue (perhaps unregulated retries) rather than the app legitimately trying to locate me 10,000 times per day.
- thrownaway2424 12y agoThat doesn't seem terribly unreasonable. Square needs location data because the Square Wallet auto-pay magic is geofenced with respect to the register.
- devindotcom 12y agoBoy, this may explain why Swype was bogging my phone down so much. Last couple months maybe it has been really slow, and I thought it was a couple large games being kept in RAM but at one point with only a couple things in the background my Swype trace was so slow I thought maybe I had a bugged version. Removed the app and the phone runs like butter. Like BUTTER. The Google glide keyboard or whatever isn't as good but brother it's better than dealing with a frozen phone.
- sciguy77 12y ago>On a side note, it has also read my contacts list 6 times, my call log 43 times and received 6 SMS/MMS messages. That's pretty alarming and seems to imply that this is not one small keyboard-related bug but rather a larger problem.
- Relys 12y agoHey guys. Just thought I'd pop in here to mention an alternative to installing Cyanogenmod or blocking all internet activity with a firewall. I found XPrivacy while looking for interesting xposed modules to install. It's like Privacy Guard but better: http://forum.xda-developers.com/xposed/modules/mod-xprivacy-1-11-8-ultimate-privacy-t2320783 http://forum.xda-developers.com/xposed/modules/mod-xprivacy-... All you need to do is root your phone and install the xposed framework on your existing ROM. :)