Reported by The Guardian
There are more than 100,000 words and phrases that the tech giant has restricted its predictive text from completing, research shows
“Australia is a very bad place to question your sexuality on MDMA with NSA spies” might be a text you would wish to send to your friends, if you have had an extraordinarily complicated night out in Sydney.
But your iPhone won’t help you spell any of it if you try to swipe-type it – that is, by gliding a finger across a keyboard as opposed to pecking out a word.
More from the original report
New research shows that Apple has a “grey list” of more than 100,000 words and phrases that it has restricted from being completed by its predictive text.
So if a user wishes to type phrases such as “Dictator Trump”, “NSA spies” or, surprisingly, “Australia is a very bad place”, “question your sexuality” or “on MDMA”, they will have to spell them out.
Apple’s predictive text will not suggest these words. And, if a user attempts to swipe-type them, they will often stumble, changing “United Ireland” to “United Iceland”, for example, or “Tibetan independence” to “Tibetan independences”.
The “grey list” was discovered by the independent researcher Derik Kauffman, whose other projects include using AI to find errors in scientific papers. After noticing that he had problems typing certain phrases – but not others – on his iPhone, Kauffman was able to unearth a table containing the list, encoded in Apple’s operating system.
The list he found includes some unsurprising words and phrases. Apple’s iPhone will not autocomplete references to drugs, sexual acts and, perhaps in the spirit of corporate protection, “iMessage isn’t working”.
But it also includes possibly politically charged phrases, which Kauffman described to Reuters as a “light-touch form of censorship”. Among these are “Trayvon Martin”, the name of the Black teenager shot in Florida in 2012, “Kashmir dispute”, “Muslim extremist” and “male chauvinist pig”.
In Hebrew, Apple will not autocomplete the phrase “the occupied territories”. In Arabic, it will not autocomplete the phrase “the Hamas movement”.
The list is one more glimpse into the dark bowels of…