The only app I can’t live without. Except for gboard, all of my applications are Foss. There is no competition for gboard’s swipe typing, not to mention its many capabilities like as searching for gifs, stickers, being able to paste copied images, translating, and so on. I’d like to know how I can use gboard while maintaining my privacy. According to what I’ve heard, it sends all typing data to Google’s server. If you ask me, that’s a massive no-no. Do you have any suggestions?
If you’re on calyxos, grapheneos, or lineageos you can disable network permisions for that app. If not, use netguard as a firewall and block it.
https://f-droid.org/packages/eu.faircode.netguard/
If you have Google play services the keyboard could phone home through play services. Shutting off network access isn’t 100% effective, especially for Google apps.
Obviously depending on your threat model this is fine.
If you are using Graphene, Play Services are themselves sandboxed and running as a user app with no privileges. I think they really can’t be accessed on graphene, unless specifically choosing to.
I have a limited understanding. But I believe in graphene the Google Play services are available in the user account that is running the Google Play services. So if you have a Google keyboard running as your main user and you have Google Play services running in your main user account they can talk to each other. That’s how apps like signal could use Google Play services for message detection.
But if you have a work account and a personal account and Google Play is only in the work account. The personal account cant cross talk to it.