Do You Trust Grammarly?
I just received an email from them with many stats about my writing over the last week. It's pretty scary to see how much tracking they are doing.
Do you trust Grammarly? Are there any good alternatives?
I'm not entirely sure I can eloquently put it into words, but I cannot see how Grammarly could possibly be trustable or even how trust should play a role in the decision to use it.
I mean it's a service that basically tracks every word you write, and does so for what I consider a very small benefit. Even if you can trust Grammarly to be completely ethical today and in the future, no service can claim that it's completely secure from hacking.
All OSes have what is essentially the same service as Grammarly, without having to stream every word you type to a third-party service.
All automated "writing & style" tools are for people who can't write and have no style. If that's you, great -- better to use the tool than not.
Otherwise, everything -- from Word's style tips, to these online tools are the death of authorial voice.
I mean to write precisely what I say. Not "to write what I say" because that's "more concise and easier for the reader". Precisely what I say, because that's more evocative of my frustration.
https://languagetool.org for sure. Europe-based, can host your own server. Plus, it's the only one that doesn't seem to eat my Mac's battery.
Some (might be all, actually?) parts are open source as well.
Grammarly suggested that I change "object-oriented programming" to "thing-oriented programming." How competent do you think their data team really is?
No, I don't trust Grammarly one bit. I think there was even a question in their FAQ asking "are you a keylogger?". The answer went along the lines of "No! Absolutely not! But also yes."
My team still uses it despite my attempts to get them to do otherwise.
The way IT security has been (mis)handled by firms large and small, it’s just a matter of time till Grammarly announces a system breach and uses corporatese to hide the true impact and what was lost. When companies in highly regulated industries (like finance) get away with hardly any punishment, I’m not sure what kind of actions or threats of actions would even be effective against an unregulated company. Yes, reputation matters, but I’ve seen that cost is the main concern for many companies.
I wouldn’t trust any company with sending every keystroke (almost) to the company’s servers. That’s why on iOS I don’t use any custom keyboards, and even if I try any, I don’t give them “Full Access” (which means it can send the keystrokes over the network).
You could almost view it as something close to a keylogger for one's own consciousness. I wouldn't trust them with my half collected thoughts, doesn't matter where their intentions lie with regards to selling said thoughts to advertisers. That's not even the worst thing that could happen with such a trove of data.
I work at Grammarly. The weekly insights are meant for our users to see their writing improvements over time. These calculations (such as the number of words written) remain linked to your account, but the text you write does not (unless it's a document you've saved in the Grammarly Editor). This calculation is updated continuously throughout the week as you write more text with Grammarly. Users can see all the data that Grammarly has stored on them by submitting a personal data request from their account hub (https://account.grammarly.com) under "Security."
I also want to note that we don't make money by selling user data (never have and never will), which some of the messages here seem to imply — we do it by selling subscriptions to Grammarly Premium and Grammarly Business. We process text to be able to provide the service. More here: https://www.grammarly.com/trust
Absolutely not. There was a point in my career where I was paid (pretty well) to be a writer. Grammarly was routinely off the mark, often hilariously so.
Grammarly has difficulty correcting even basic grammar mistakes. I would never trust for anything beyond being a basic spellcheck and last minute hygiene check before you hit publish.
Grammarly is banned by my employer and plenty others I imagine. I’ll let that speak for itself
The best alternative is a copy of Strunk & White and/or a colleague who has one. It is really quick to read cover-to-cover and understand, and it will make you a much better writer of everything.
No, I don't trust grammarly. On top of the surveillance, it often makes grammar mistakes!
Well its a great tool for non native English speakers. It helps them on correcting a lot of basics and build confidence once you get feedback.
But I am not sure of the correctness in the advanced stages.
We permit use of Grammarly only using the stand-alone app or website, and only for content that doesn't contain any personal data & isn't security critical, e.g. blog posts, etc.
As others have said, the browser extension is an unmanageable security risk and we prevent its use and installation.
Think of an adversary government (e.g China), and then ask your self that same question if Grammarly were headquartered there.
... then ask yourself why you think country of origin even matters when it comes to your privacy given the past 20 years of both government and corporate surveillance.
I don't trust any cloud provider I don't pay, and those I do pay I don't trust either.
NEVER.
I would happily pick bad grammar over using Grammarly.
Where do you write that doesn't have the grammar correction built in from the OS?
If I ever want to check my grammar or language (this is quite rare), I just write it out and then put it in some online grammar checker like QuillBot. Works well for me.
I have trust issues
EDIT : I would happily try out some self hosted ones though. I will keep going through the thread here.
I've been thinking about this problem and this is my thought process:
1. A tool like grammarly is super helpful for the majority of non-english speaking population. So, this is not something like Facebook that we can just ignore and boycott. This is a truly useful category of tooling.
2. But, sending everything that the user types over wire and predicting with a heavy model that can only run on massive servers is evil.
3. The only viable alternative is either come up with a tech that encrypts data over wire, such that sentences cannot be decontstructed back at the server, but knows what indices in the client string. should be replaced - I'm not even sure if something like this is possible.
4. Just ship the entire model to the edge, so that no data gets transferred. Google has managed to ship a light-weight model to its Picel devices, apparently but I'm not sure effective this could be: https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/10/grammar-correction-as-you-...
No, I wouldn't trust it to not log everything I type. I also think that there is value in practicing your writing skills.
I know this will sound very entitled, but it also sort-of bothers me how such tools might make everyone's writing, even with poor writing skills, look uniform so that it is harder to read between the lines and know what kind of person you're dealing with...
I have no experience with the company beyond the by now likely 1000 highly irritating ad videos they have thrown at me, making it unlikely I ever would want to have anything to do with them. I also fail to see how a glorified spell checker adds anything of substance or real style to ones writing, so I'm happy sticking to my locally installed spell checker.
I feel like a good alternative is regular old spell check and some humility in understanding we all make grammar mistakes and are here to learn. We were fine without a network connected snooping “grammar” bot. Consider not using stuff like this.
I've never even looked into Grammarly but I just assumed that they'd store everything I type. Not even worth looking into for the sake of my security.
It is very obviously some intelligence agency op.
No. I only ever use it as a last resort when I need some non-sensitive text double-checked. And by “use” I mean that it’s installed as a keyboard app on my smartphone (where I believe I can keep its possible logging activity to a minimum), but not used as an actual keyboard, only as a grammar checker to be activated whenever and wherever I need it.
Absolutely nope. Giving Google (smartphone) and Microsoft (work laptop) total access to anything I type on my keyboard is already difficult to swallow.
Also, because I developed some sort of gag reflex when I see anything related to them after being forced to watch their ads repeatedly for months.
> Do you trust Grammarly?
Replace 'Grammarly' with 'a keylogger'.
Would you trust it now?
Are you absolutely sure that it would not 'spell check' your master password and send it over to their servers without someone else looking at them and what website, field you were typing it on?
Now would you trust it even more?
It's just such an incredible tool that I have to trust it. The vscode plugins is such a time saver from writing docs or LaTeX. Still wouldn't use it for really confidential stuff. Their terms of use are also a bit... suboptimal.
They have way to many online ads for a reputable service. Like that fake adblocker (which must be fake, because why would an Adblocker advertise on the very medium it's working against?) and all those VPNs.
Yes. The only stuff it really sees is what I write on HN/Reddit/RyanMercer.com and papers I'm writing for class. 95%+ of what it sees me write is already public domain.
If I may suggest, there is a solid tool called "Antidote" that does French and English, has a dedicated app and a chrome extension. It got me through my master.
No.
Consider buying a copy of The Elements of Style by EB White and William Strunk Jr. It's a tiny book that you can read cover-to-cover over a weekend.
Apply the concepts in the book.
You're all set.
I always think of them as a helpful key logger. /s
I trust it more than I trust myself to spot issues.
I use them, but I don’t trust them.
I feel that trusting Grammarly is like trusting GitHub will not leak your code in private repository.
One of my first introductions to tech was installing a keylogger to see how it works
I've been avoidant of anything that does similar since, it really shaped my view of privacy instantly seeing (all my own) passwords, private messages, heck even delete and tab key presses, everything being dumped to a log file in real-time.
Imagine if they got hacked.
tldr: too creepy for me
I trust them to send themselves a copy of everything I type.