Am I being spied on?
I often use my Nexus 5 to navigate through reddit, I simply use the mobile version of the website, nothing else. The other day I was writing an answer to a post, I don't know what exactly happened, maybe I just tapped some keys I was not supposed to, but a quite long string suddenly appeared in the textarea. It was long 628 bytes/characters and it was made up of ALL the previous characters that I had pressed before that moment, without any space.
Trying to be more clear, imagine I had done something like this
- looked for Anthony's phone number (found after having typed 4 chars)
- searched "fried chicken recipe" on google
- posted a comment on a forum: "I has no idea"
- corrected the previous answer by deleting "has" and replacing it with "have"
the resulting string was just this
AnthfriedchickenrecipeIhasnoideahave
and it magically appeared on my textarea. On reddit. Without any reason. I just now that I had tapped some wrong button on the keyword (that's the "ai.type", free version).
Now, am I being paranoid, or there's something strange happening on my phone? Why should a piece of code need to store all the characters i press, if not a keylogger? I can accept the idea that maybe the OS or the Keyboard could actually have a valid reason to do that (the keyboard could be interested in most frequent words to improve suggestion mechanism) but (1) it's not documented anywhere and (2) it's incredibly strange that I managed to access such string accidentally.
Turning on paranoid mode, I bought my nexus online from a reseller, not the google website, and I can't remember whether the box was covered by a plastic film or not. If not (it surely happened a couple of years ago with my previous phone) is it plausible that the reseller preinstalled some kind of spyware to the firmware level? I've read that it happens more often than one would think.
What do you think about all of this?
Posted Sep 23, 2015, 9:11 PM UTC · edited
Chrome browser (or another browser using Chromium engine)?
If so, that's a common issue with text in web forms with certain 3rd party keyboards and has been going on for two years or so now. Nobody can seem to identify whether it's Chrome or the keyboards that are at fault, but sometimes it gets better and sometimes worse, usually with Chrome releases, so it seems to be Chrome related, especially since it doesn't happen in any other apps. It happens in various forms with SwiftKey and Fleksy in my experience also. Sometimes it will just randomly insert the last word typed when hitting space, sometimes it will add the last ten or so things typed, sometimes it just makes context predictions based off words that aren't even in the web form, or it will even just randomly move the cursor position backward between 2-5 characters causing me to type into the middle of words I've already completed. I have to be extremely careful and proofread anytime I type into a web form because of this never ending bug.
Yes, I'm using chrome, but the string also contains keyords that I used on YouTube app (not website) to make a research. So the words "recording" happened during the use of multiple applications, this is why I think it can be the OS or the keyboard (in the best case) or something malicious
I understand that the words that appeared were originally typed in a different app, but it was using the same keyboard, correct?
It's an issue with keyboard buffers somehow running into actual text inside Chrome web forms. SwiftKey has been trying to fix this for two years without success since Chrome is a constant moving target.
It's really strange what shows up, but it only ever dumps text into web forms, in Chrome, never anything else. Ever. But I've gotten half of Reddit comments posted via an app hours before that show up in Chrome web forms with SwiftKey and Fleksy. SwiftKey seems to do it more, but that may just be because I use it more than Fleksy.