Gboard's privacy settings, one by one

This is a teardown of a settings page, not of a company. Gboard is a good keyboard, most of its intelligence runs on the phone, and Google documents its data flows in a help article titled "Learn how Gboard gets better". I am going to walk that article's switches in order and say what each one does in Google's words, because the question people actually type into a search box is "how do I stop my keyboard sending data", and the honest answer has two halves.

The switches, as Google describes them

Federated learning. Google's page: federated learning "doesn't send the text you speak or type to Google, but will send what it learns to Google". It runs only "while your phone charges, is connected to Wi-Fi, and isn't in use". The control is under Settings, System, Language & input, On-screen keyboard, Gboard, Privacy. Turning it off stops the model updates leaving the phone. It does not change anything else in this list.

Audio donations. The page says "snippets of your audio input on Gboard are sent to and stored by Google to improve speech recognition", each snippet at most 15 seconds, up to 25 if it contains silence, and "Google won't keep these snippets beyond 18 months". Off switch: open the keyboard, Settings, Privacy, under Voice toggle Audio donations off.

Personalize for you. Described as "audio recordings and transcripts of what you say and type will be saved on this device". On device, per the page. This is the switch that makes prediction learn your words; it is also the one whose data you can wipe with "Delete learned words & data" under Settings, Gboard, Privacy.

Improve for everyone. "Audio recordings and transcripts of what you say will be saved on this device", and it is the donation mechanism's local half.

Delete learned words & data. Not a switch, an action: it clears what the on-device learning has stored.

That is a fair set of controls, documented in plain language, and if you use Gboard you should read the page rather than my summary of it. Link at the end.

The half no switch covers

Every control above is a policy the app enforces on itself. The reason they exist is that Gboard holds the INTERNET permission, so the question "what leaves the phone" is a live one that has to be answered feature by feature, and answered again whenever a feature changes.

There is no switch labelled "network", because on Android a network permission is granted at install and is not something an app exposes a toggle for. So the state you are in after turning everything off is: an app that can reach the network, that has said it will not use it for these purposes, on this version.

That is a promise, made by a company with a documented policy and a lot to lose by breaking it. I am not suggesting it is a lie. I am pointing out that it is a different kind of object from a permission that is absent.

What FrankenKeys gives up to get there

Fairness cuts both ways. The reason Gboard has a federated learning switch is that federated learning improves its predictions with data from a great many phones. FrankenKeys learns only from you. Its dictionaries are frequency lists shipped in the package, and its personal model is a word-count file in app-private storage that you can wipe from the in-app Privacy page. If your use of language is unusual, Gboard will get there faster, because it has more to learn from.

Gboard's voice typing is also, on most phones, better than what the system recogniser gives a third-party keyboard, because Google's keyboard and Google's recogniser are built together. FrankenKeys uses the same system recogniser everyone else gets, bound on-device explicitly on Android 12 and up. The trade is written up on the voice typing page.

If you are staying on Gboard

Then do the following, from Google's own page, and you will have done what can be done:

1. Settings, System, Language & input, On-screen keyboard, Gboard, Privacy: turn off federated learning.
2. Keyboard, Settings, Privacy, Voice: turn off Audio donations.
3. Decide about Personalize for you. It stays on the device per the page, and it is what makes the keyboard learn your words.
4. Use Delete learned words & data when you hand the phone to someone else.

What you will not have done is removed the network permission, because you cannot. If that is the property you want, it has to be a property of the keyboard you pick, and the table of which keyboards hold INTERNET is where to start.

A switch is a sentence. A missing permission is a wall. Both are useful; only one of them is something you can check without reading.