Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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The not-so-silent type: Vulnerabilities across keyboard apps reveal keystrokes to network eavesdroppers - The Citizen Lab (citizenlab.ca)

submitted 6 months ago by lemmyreader@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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[–] sawa@lemmy.world 39 points 6 months ago (3 children)

TLDR:

This study mainly targets Pinyin input, the most popular Chinese input method (hence 1bn potentially affected).

Vulnerabilities were due to the keyboards’ use of the cloud for dictionaries used in IMEs (essentially a conversion engine). Such IMEs are must-haves for certain languages and converts A-Zs to other scripts. Lack of E2EE resulted in exposed keystrokes.

Personally I would recommend switching to something which uses a local dictionary. RIME is a good FOSS alternative and can be configured to work on Android via fcitx.

While the study doesn't cover English keyboards, this is as good a reminder as any not to use in-built dictionaries in general unless you have to.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 4 points 6 months ago

If you are in China you also have to be very worried about the Chinese government. This is just one out of hundreds of other tools they have to detect disloyalty

[–] lemmyreader@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 months ago

Thanks for the tl;dr and suggestions.

[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago

Thank you :)