Apple’s grey list: Words and phrases your iPhone won’t help you spell

Apple's iPhone has a list of over 100,000 words and phrases that it prevents its predictive text from completing, according to new research. This "grey list" includes phrases like "Dictator Trump," "NSA spies," "Australia is a very bad place," and "question your sexuality on MDMA." These words and phrases are restricted due to what Apple considers inappropriate or offensive content.

The researcher behind the discovery, Derik Kauffman, stumbled upon the list while experiencing difficulties typing certain phrases on his iPhone. The list contains both unsurprising and possibly politically charged terms, such as "Trayvon Martin," "Kashmir dispute," "Muslim extremist," "male chauvinist pig," "the occupied territories," and "the Hamas movement."

These restrictions are an example of Apple's "light-touch form of censorship." The predictive text technology has evolved from simple word lookup in Unix to more sophisticated transformer-based systems, as seen in Apple's current autocorrect. Apple claims that its keyboard aims to avoid offering inappropriate or offensive suggestions, and users can always override the predictive text if needed.