{"id":678616,"date":"2026-11-08T13:16:11","date_gmt":"2026-11-08T13:16:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/678616\/"},"modified":"2026-11-08T13:16:11","modified_gmt":"2026-11-08T13:16:11","slug":"a-very-light-touch-form-of-censorship-the-iphone-has-a-gray-list-of-words-and-phrases-that-apple-wont-auto-complete-for-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/678616\/","title":{"rendered":"‘A very light-touch form of censorship’: the iPhone has a ‘gray list’ of words and phrases that Apple won’t auto-complete for you"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reuters<\/a>, and verified by an independent cybersecurity engineer. It’s thought that there are at least 100,000 words and phrases in the list.<\/p>\n

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Other entries on the gray list, as reported by The Guardian<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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There’s no issue with typing out any of these terms and including them in any kind of message \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

More transparency<\/p>\n

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\"iOS\n<\/p>\n

iOS being shown off at WWDC (Image credit: Apple)<\/p>\n

Apple<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

You may like<\/p>\n

You may remember last year there was something of a kerfuffle<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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”.<\/p>\n

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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.”<\/p>\n

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Today’s best iPhone deals<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter iOS bans certain…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":678617,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[61,60,202,80],"class_list":["post-678616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mobile","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mobile","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=678616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/678617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=678616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=678616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=678616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}