Apple Blocks 100,000+ Words From iPhone Predictive Text

Researcher Derik Kauffman uncovered Apple’s “grey list”—a collection of more than 100,000 words and phrases excluded from the iPhone’s predictive text and swipe-typing features. When users attempt to input these terms, autocomplete suggestions don’t appear, and swipe-typing frequently misfires, changing “United Ireland” to “United Iceland” and “Tibetan independence” to “Tibetan independences”.

The list encompasses drug references, sexual content, and corporate terms like “iMessage isn’t working”, along with politically charged phrases such as “Trayvon Martin”, “Kashmir dispute”, “Muslim extremist”, and “male chauvinist pig”. Kauffman characterized the practice as a “light-touch form of censorship”.

The finding illuminates how autocorrect technology operates. Autocorrect evolved from simple word lookup tables in Unix systems to statistical n-gram prediction, and Apple recently implemented a “transformer-based” system akin to large language models. Apple stated it designs keyboards to avoid inappropriate suggestions and that users can always manually type out words and override predictive recommendations.