Incognito & secure fields

WM Keyboard has two separate ways of not learning from you: incognito mode, a switch you (or a private-browsing tab) control, and secure fields, which the app you’re typing into declares outright. They pause different things, so it’s worth keeping them apart.

Screenshot pending

The incognito badge next to the toolbar, and the toolbox tool that turns it on.

Turning incognito on

Incognito is one boolean, flipped from either of two places:

• The Incognito tool in the toolbox: tap it to toggle, and you’ll feel a short vibration and see a toast: Incognito on — typing is not learned or Incognito off. It isn’t pinned to the toolbar by default, so open the toolbox (the grid button) to find it the first time.
• WM Keyboard›Privacy›On-device learning›Incognito mode — the same switch, off by default.

Both control one underlying setting, so toggling either place flips the other. On top of that manual switch, WM Keyboard can turn incognito on for you automatically: when a field asks Android not to personalize learning from it (which is exactly what a Chrome incognito tab does for every field inside it, and what other browsers and some password managers do for their own private screens), incognito switches on for that field only, and switches back off the moment you leave it. This never touches the manual switch, so a private tab doesn’t accidentally leave incognito on everywhere else. It’s controlled by WM Keyboard›Privacy›On-device learning›Follow private browsing, on by default.

That automatic trigger relies entirely on a flag the host app has to set. An app that never sends it can’t be detected this way: there’s no way for the keyboard to otherwise know it’s inside a private tab. If you tap the Incognito tool while a field is already auto-incognito, there’s nothing left for the switch to turn off, so you get a toast instead: This field is always incognito.

What incognito pauses

Turning incognito on does exactly five things (nothing more):

1. Pauses clipboard capture. Nothing you copy joins clipboard history while it’s on.
2. Pauses learning. The on-device word and phrase lexicon stops picking up anything new, and so does the CJK pick history: the two go quiet together. Emoji usage (what feeds the emoji panel’s Recent and Most used tabs) is tracked separately and keeps recording regardless of incognito.
3. Blocks inline chips, both kinds. The saved-login chips a password manager can draw above the keyboard don’t appear, and neither do the system’s smart replies: a proposed reply means the system read the conversation, which is what incognito is there to stop.
4. Pauses AI history. If you’ve turned AI history on, nothing is recorded while incognito is: not the text you send, not the answer. This one has no switch of its own, because a record of what you wrote in incognito is the exact thing incognito exists to prevent.
5. Shows a badge. A small icon appears next to the toolbar, and the Incognito tool itself lights up as active, so you can tell at a glance that it’s on.

Two of those five have their own switches, tucked away from the Privacy screen under WM Keyboard›Tools›Incognito: Pause learning and Pause clipboard capture, both on by default. Turn both off there and flipping “Incognito mode” on Privacy still blocks inline chips, still pauses AI history, and still shows the badge; it just stops pausing those two. The chip block is the one effect that isn’t gated by either of those two switches: it follows incognito unconditionally.

What incognito leaves alone

Incognito never turns off the suggestion strip, autocorrect, or gesture typing: those keep using whatever the keyboard already knows. Only the writing of new words and clips pauses; the reading of what’s already learned doesn’t. If you want the strip itself gone, that’s what secure fields are for, below.

Password and secure fields

Independently of incognito, the keyboard checks whether the field you’re typing into is a password field: the input type Android password boxes, visible-password fields, and PIN-style number fields all declare. Detection needs no permission and no guessing: it reads directly off the field’s declared input type.

A password field: no suggestion strip, no smart chips.

A secure field switches off, for as long as it has focus:

• The suggestion strip: this is the one thing the Suggestions in every field override can never bring back.
• Autocorrect and gesture typing.
• Autocapitalization for handwritten words.
• Smart suggestion chips (calculator, currency, unit conversions, tool shortcuts).
• Learning: the same lexicon incognito pauses, paused here too.
• Voice dictation, entirely. Tapping the voice tool in a password field shows Voice typing is unavailable in password fields instead of starting: this is a hard block, not just a hidden strip.

What a secure field does not switch off is character entry itself. Transliteration composing (the mechanism that turns romanized keystrokes into Bengali, or any other transliterating script) still runs in password fields, because without it the untransliterated Latin letters would commit instead. Handwriting recognition still commits the word you wrote; it simply offers no candidate list to pick from, and doesn’t remember the word afterward.

Clipboard hygiene around passwords

The clipboard tool treats password-shaped clips two different ways, depending on whether you’re copying or pasting.

When you copy something, a clip can be flagged sensitive by the app it came from (Android lets an app mark what it puts on the clipboard, and a password manager does exactly that when you copy a login), or, if you turn on Recognise them yourself, by an on-device check: a clip counts only when the whole thing is one token that reads as generated rather than typed (a short one-time-code shape, or a longer mix of cases, digits and symbols), so a code quoted inside a message or a copied link is left alone. WM Keyboard›Tools›Clipboard›Sensitive clips decides what happens to a flagged clip: keep it like any other, hide it and expire it quickly (the default), or never save it at all. A hidden clip renders masked behind a lock icon, with just a character count in place of the text: tap it and it pastes straight into the field, the same as any other clip; there’s no reveal-in-place. Pinning one overrides all of that, since pinning is an explicit “keep this.”

Screenshot pending

A sensitive clip, masked in the clipboard panel.

Pasting is the other half, and it’s unconditional on the sensitivity detection above: paste anything into a password field (from the clipboard panel, the paste chip, hold-V, or Ctrl+V) and the keyboard deletes that entry from history and clears the system clipboard behind it, so nothing sits there readable by every other app on the device. This only fires for pastes the keyboard itself makes; a paste through the field’s own long-press menu isn’t covered. It’s controlled by Forget after pasting a password, on by default, under WM Keyboard›Tools›Clipboard›History: it sits with the rest of clipboard history rather than beside the sensitive-clip options below.

Sensitive-clip handling under Passwords & codes, both on by default.

Neither of these depends on incognito being on: they run any time the clipboard tool is enabled. And regardless of any of the above, nothing is ever captured into history at all, sensitive or not, while you’re inside a secure field, or while incognito’s clipboard pause applies.

What incognito doesn’t hide

Incognito and secure fields are entirely local-processing decisions: pause learning, pause clipboard capture, hide a strip. Neither one ever stops text you type from reaching the app you typed it into; that was never their job. Two things worth knowing specifically:

• Network tools aren’t gated by either. Translate, web and image search, GIF and sticker search, and the AI tool all send whatever you type into their panel to that tool’s own provider, exactly as normal, whether incognito is on or off, and even inside a password field, since only voice dictation is blocked there. If you don’t want a particular tool touching the network, disable that tool; incognito won’t do it for you. See Network policy for the full rundown of what each tool sends.
• Voice dictation can leave the device even when it isn’t blocked. By default it uses Android’s own speech recognizer, which prefers an on-device model but transparently falls back to a network recognizer for languages the on-device model doesn’t cover. That fallback has nothing to do with incognito; it’s only ever blocked by the secure-field check above.

Hiding the toolbar on the lock screen

That’s a related but separate setting: WM Keyboard›Appearance›Toolbar›Hide toolbar & clipboard on lock screen, off by default. It drops the entire suggestion-and-toolbar strip and blocks the clipboard panel while the device is locked, so copied one-time codes and passwords can’t be read off a screen anyone can wake. It isn’t tied to incognito or secure fields at all.

Options

WM Keyboard›Privacy›On-device learning

• Incognito mode — default off. Pauses learning and clipboard capture until you turn it off again.
• Follow private browsing — default on. Switches incognito on by itself for a field that asks for it, for as long as that field has focus.

WM Keyboard›Tools›Incognito

• Pause learning — default on. One of the two things “Incognito mode” actually pauses.
• Pause clipboard capture — default on. The other one.
• Follow private browsing — the same setting as above, shown again here since this is also where you’d look for it.

WM Keyboard›Tools›Clipboard›Passwords & codes

• Sensitive clips — default Hide and forget quickly. The other options are “Keep like any clip” and “Never save.”
• Recognise them yourself — default on. Only shown once Sensitive clips isn’t set to “Keep like any clip.” Extends the app’s own sensitive-clip flag with an on-device shape check.
• Forget sensitive clips after — default 5 minutes. Only shown while Sensitive clips is “Hide and forget quickly.” Independent of the ordinary clipboard history expiry.

WM Keyboard›Tools›Clipboard›History

• Forget after pasting a password — default on. Deletes a clip from history and from the system clipboard the moment it’s pasted into a password field.

For every other clipboard and tool setting, see the tool settings reference and Privacy settings reference.

Details & edge cases

• Incognito and secure fields stack independently. A password field is already secure on its own account: its detection doesn’t depend on incognito being on. Learning is already off there either way, but autofill chips aren’t gated by the secure-field check at all, only by incognito, so turning incognito on inside a password field is what blocks them; it isn’t redundant the way it is for learning.
• Existing learned words are never touched. Turning on incognito, or turning off “Learn from typing” entirely, only stops new words and patterns from being recorded; nothing already learned is deleted. Wiping what’s already stored is a separate action; see Your data on device.
• “Add words to the system dictionary” follows the same learning and incognito gate as the keyboard’s own lexicon, so it pauses right alongside it rather than needing incognito awareness of its own.
• The badge is the only visual difference. Outside the small icon next to the toolbar and the active state on the Incognito tool, the keyboard looks identical whether incognito is on or off; there’s no separate “incognito theme.”
• A field can’t be un-incognito’d from the app side. Once a field sets the no-personalized-learning flag, the only way to type into it without incognito is to leave the field, since “Follow private browsing” reads that flag, not anything you can override per-field.

See Network policy for what leaves the device outside of typing itself, and Your data on device for the full inventory of what’s stored locally and how to clear it.