The SwiftKey keyboard app is busy leaking email addresses and phone numbers to strangers

Who doesn't love a good AI-driven keyboard, eh? Well, people who have discovered that the keyboard is sending their email address and phone number to strangers, for starters. And that seems to be precisely what's happening with SwiftKey.

The Microsoft-owned company has disabled the syncing of data between devices after users complained not only about the appearance of unknown email addresses and phone numbers in suggestions, but also suggestions in unknown foreign languages. The problem became apparent when users who saw the random email address suggestions contacted the owner of the address.

The problem has been going on for a few days now, and there is an active thread on Reddit (warning: it's a little sweary) in which people have complained about the issue even on brand new, factory-reset, or freshly-rooted handsets. One Redditor says: "I had to factory reset my note 4 a few days ago and I found it weird when I reinstalled SwiftKey that it was giving me Spanish suggestions. After seeing your post I just went to the Gmail login id field and I saw someone else's email as a suggestion!"

Speaking to the Telegraph, someone else affected by the problem said:

A few days ago, I received an email from a complete stranger asking if I had recently purchased and returned a particular model of mobile phone, adding that not one but two of my email addresses (one personal and one work address) were saved on the phone she had just bought as brand-new.

SwiftKey responded on Reddit saying: "Our team is looking into this as a matter of priority".

The company has also issued a statement on its blog:

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 [email protected].

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.