The most popular Chinese keyboard app which is used by more than 450 million monthly users sends every key typed to Tencent in China.

https://lemmy.world/post/2961593

I live in China and this software is cancerous not just in the encryption failure, it also nestles into a computer like a trojan. Creates 2 fallback installations and will reinstall itself after removal if you reboot in between, unless you get rid of all 3 installations at once, where they are deliberately trying to obfuscate the uninstall button (triple confirmation, swapping the confirm/cancel buttons and button background colors, etc.).

It’s a nasty piece of crap that come preloaded on any phone (android, at least) and Windows-PC here.

Do people generally try to circumvent it? Are they too scared to uninstall it? Or do they just not care?
Worse. They think it’s useful.
Why? Useful for safety and security of the society?
Why do people use Facebook and Instagram? Because they think it's cool and fun to share with friends, regardless what data FB is gathering on them.
I thought we are talking about a keyboard app?

Yeah, wtf is that equivalency?

“Why do people smoke”

“Well some people like to eat at restaurants or watch movies with their friends so”

It was a “what about” analogy. It compares a app that steals data without the users consent and the other one is the keyboard app. Both seem to be wanted by consumers despite the steeling parts.
Yeah but a social media platform has completely different qualities. Therefore the reasons for people how and why they use them will be completely different. Also the keyboard app is forced on the phones by the state while the use of social media platforms is optional. Just too many different factors at play here imo.
Some weird downvotes, and I want to know too. Why does a keyboard app mean anything to anyone? The keyboards included on iOS and latest Android versions are great.

Don’t know about this keyboard or Chinese, but a language specific feature might be one of the reason.

I use SwiftKey and I love how it supports multilingual autocorrect and prediction for Indonesian and English without needing to switch between keyboard language.

iOS built in keyboard supports multilingual typing for some languages, but not Indonesian.

I assume people love it also because some specific feature that doesn’t exist in the stock keyboard.