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- iOS prohibits certain terms from auto-complete and swipe-to-type
- They include references to politics and drugs, the researchers report
- The list could contain more than 100,000 entries, apparently
Try typing out phrases like “sleepy Joe,” “dictator Trump” or “Tibetan independence” on your iPhone, and you’ll notice that you don’t get auto-complete suggestions for them, and you can’t type them – evidence of a ‘grey list’ of terms discovered hidden in iOS.
The so-called gray list was discovered by researcher Derek Kauffman and reported by Reuters, and verified by an independent cybersecurity engineer. It is believed that there are at least 100,000 words and phrases in the list.
Other entries on the gray list, as reported by The Guardian, include “NSA spies”, “Question your sexuality”, and even “Australia is a very bad place”. References to drug use also do not appear to be available through auto-complete or swipe tipping.
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There is no problem to execute any of these terms and include them in any kind of message – but the point is that iOS does not try to fill them in automatically as it will with other words and phrases, or let you type them by swiping.
More transparency
Apple is keeping its cards close to the chest: it did not immediately comment on the list in an email sent to Reuters, but acknowledged that the iPhone keyboard was set up to avoid suggestions that could be inappropriate or offensive.
You may remember last year that there was something of a kerfuffle over iPhones changing “Trump” to “racist” during dictation. It wasn’t clear exactly what happened, but with any kind of AI-driven automation, these kinds of problems can arise.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s David Greene told Reuters that while he sees the thinking behind a graylist for the iOS keyboard, “this is something that users should be really well aware of and have some ability to customize”.
Even for Kauffman, a little more transparency from Apple about exactly what is going on here, and why, would be welcome. “It’s a very light-touch form of censorship,” the researcher told Reuters. “But at the scale that Apple operates, it only takes a light touch to have a big impact.”
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