The iPhone has a ‘gray list’ of words and phrases that won’t auto-complete

• iOS bans certain terms from auto-complete and swipe-to-type
• They include references to politics and drugs, researchers report
• The list could include more than 100,000 entries, apparently

Try and type out phrases like “sleepy Joe”, “dictator Trump”, or “Tibetan independence” on your iPhone, and you’ll notice that you don’t get auto-complete suggestions for them, and you can’t swipe-type them — evidence of a ‘gray list’ of terms that has been discovered hidden in iOS.

The so-called gray list was discovered by researcher Derek Kauffman and reported by Reuters, and verified by an independent cybersecurity engineer. It’s thought that there are at least 100,000 words and phrases in the list.

Other entries on the gray list, as reported by The Guardian, include “NSA spies”, “question your sexuality”, and even “Australia is a very bad place”. References to drug use also seem to be unavailable through auto-complete or swipe typing.

There’s no issue with typing out any of these terms and including them in any kind of message — but the point is that iOS won’t try and auto-complete them like it will with other words and phrases, or let you type them through swiping.

More transparency

Apple is keeping its cards close to its chest: it didn’t comment on the list directly in an email sent to Reuters, but did acknowledge that the iPhone keyboard was set up to avoid offering suggestions that might be inappropriate or offensive.

You may remember last year there was something of a kerfuffle over iPhones changing “Trump” to “racist” during dictation. It wasn’t clear exactly what happened, but with any kind of AI-driven automation, these sorts of issues can arise.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s David Greene told Reuters that while he could see the thinking behind a gray list for the iOS keyboard, “this is something users should be really well aware of and have some ability to customize”.

For Kauffman as well, a bit more transparency from Apple about exactly what’s going on here, and why, would be welcome. “It’s a very light-touch form of censorship,” the researcher told Reuters. “But at the scale that Apple is operating, it only takes a light touch to have a big impact.”

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