Background Gesture Data Gathering

Background data gathering (starting with v4.0)

Background data gathering may collect all data you enter using gesture typing. This is convenient to use as you can contribute data without the need to do anything other than submit it, but is very sensitive as it may record data you want to keep private. Background data gathering was developed with a strong focus on privacy, and gives a lot of control to the user.

What you can control about background gathering:

• whenever background collection is active, you will see an indicator on bottom right of the keyboard. The indicator is empty when nothing is recorded, and filled when gesture data will be saved on text field switch or closing the keyboard
  • in this state you can clear the recorded data by pressing the background gathering toolbar key
• you can enable discard by default mode, where data is discarded unless you use the background gathering toolbar key. In this mode, the toolbar key functionality switches from discard to save
• long-pressing the toolbar key disables background gathering for five minutes and clears recorded data
• you can exclude specific words from being collected
• you can exclude apps from background gathering (default is blocking all apps, so freshly installed apps are blocked by default)

Additionally:

• the order of submitted data is randomized, so no one can derive the sentences you typed
• background collection is disabled in incognito mode and in sensitive input fields (passwords, email, or whenever the input field requests the keyboard to not learn the words)
• you can review data and decide what exactly you want to discard or submit
• only words from built-in dictionaries or those available at https://codeberg.org/Helium314/aosp-dictionaries are used, everything else will not be saved

We want to clarify that background data gathering is of less value than active data gathering, because we cannot be certain of the word you actually wanted to swipe, even with some detection of corrections in place. To provide best possibly data quality, you can select suggestions instead of swiping again or correcting the word by tap typing. This way we can be sure about which word you intendet to type.