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Comment by holoduke | Hacker News Reader

Or course they are using it. With Google even this keyboard stroke on Android is used for something.

Ex-Googler here, at least in the UK, privacy was taken very seriously by all employees, we never collected data without explicit consent and never used it for anything but what the user granted permissions for.

Also ex, for a reason, everyone with ethics left, and Google “is a conventional company” now

Edit: reference https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/#:~:tex...

Didn't Google release many data collection features as an "opt-out" setting (ie: without user consent)?

> privacy was taken very seriously by all employees, we never collected data without explicit consent and never used it for anything but what the user granted permissions for.

Except when you literally trick people into providing their data: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1664682689591377923 by pretending that your dark patterns are "explicit consent"

Or except when you literally trick people into providing their data by connecting totally unrelated services https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1908951546869498085 and you don't stop until the person gives up and submits to you.

Except when your own support explicitly says that your behaviour is tracked across completely unrelated Google services: https://x.com/TeamYouTube/status/1849952594992435493

Except when you literally sign people into user accounts automatically with most data collection options turned on.

Except...

This claim, without a source, runs the risk of being misinformation, which is a massive problem in 2025.

Can you provide a reliable source to verify it?

https://research.google/pubs/federated-learning-for-mobile-k...

Thanks for getting ahead of me. I add their competitor MS doing the same even more openly:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/microsoft-swiftkey...

Always assume companies will gather, use and share your data in all ways they legally can. The burden of proof is never on the user that companies don't milk us. Calling it "misinformation" as someone further above did is bizarre. This is the default business model of big tech.

Federated Learning of Gboard Language Models with Differential Privacy

It's not nothing, but it's something. And, at least on my phone, it's not obvious if it can be turned off.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?lr&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Fe...

Any recommendations on android keyboards?

I recommended FUTO keyboard in sibling comment. FlorisBoard is a nice FOSS option, but some features are still WIP. Personally, I've switched fully to ThumbKey, but that's got quite a learning curve.

You can always opt out of using gboard altogether.

FUTO Keyboard is quite nice.

Thanks for the suggestion. It supports multi-lingual typing which in a requirement for me. I haven't checked other keyboards for a long time so perhaps that has become more common.

The integration with whisper is nice too.

I don't find the multilingual features as polished as Gboard, this is what prevents me from switching, in Gboard you can install multiple languages and write without having to switch and it will provide autosuggestions and spelling support based on the language you're typing without having to manually change the language

Heliboard is another good one: https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard

Phew, thank goodness someone policed this HN comment's quip about a multi-billion dollar company. May I recommend a more ambitious target in your war on misinformation next?

Whether it's aimed at large companies or not, I'd still rather not see misinformation spread. People already have poor enough understandings of what companies actually do and don't collect. There exists ongoing conspiracy theories that phones actively listen to conversations while in your pocket, despite there being no evidence to such a claim.

Facts do matter, and I appreciate those that make an effort to state them correctly.

Yeah, the facts were stated correctly. They just didn't provide a source. That doesn't make it misinformation. It means it's a claim without a source.

But to answer the question, Gboard absolutely uses your data. And it's right there in its privacy policy.

Misinformation isn't more or less appropriate depending on the target.

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