Ask HN: Is Grammerly a Keylogger as a Service? - buildmystartup
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canadianwriter
They've been advertising to me hardcore and it is completely free. It makes me
wonder what data they are selling.

I have no issue with them advertising to me based on what I've typed but if
they put me in audiences based on it and sell those I get uncomfortable.

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fusiongyro
It's not completely free. Their free version is a limited-feature
advertisement for the premium version, which is between $12 and $30 a month
depending on billing frequency.

[https://www.grammarly.com/premium](https://www.grammarly.com/premium)

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johnnyfaehell
I use the free version. I would use the premium version if it was like 5-10 a
month. But if I want to pay monthly it's 30 and that's a bit too expensive for
my liking.

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fusiongyro
They have that, if you pay annually.

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EGreg
I have always wondered why spelling and grammar checkers - which could easily
fit on your computer back in the 90s - needed a cloud-based provider.

One could easily build chrome extensions that DIDN'T phone home.

Today deep learning data can be downloaded to each computer. They are doing it
with small IOT!!

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vbezhenar
Because their algorithms are their valuable intellectual property and hiding
them behind server is the only real way to protect. Of course it has nothing
to do with performance.

May be they use some statistics over uploaded texts to improve algorithms.

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tokyoSurfer
While we are focusing on Facebook, Google etc. for breaking our privacy to
extract data and pass it to third parties, we are willing to use Grammarly,
CloudFlare and CrashPlan, pay for it and use it while hoping they will not
work with security services. We need much more transparency it seems.

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EGreg
There is this idea floating around that the corollary to "if you aren't
paying, you're the product" to "if you are paying, you're not."

I wonder why so many people tacitly assume that paying for a service will make
them forego mining your data and monetizing it. Very few people read the terms
of service in its entirety regardless of whether they pay or not.

What we SHOULD do is standardize privacy policy clauses already.

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reustle
For those interested, here's the site:
[https://www.grammarly.com/](https://www.grammarly.com/)

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pvg
If you think that, you can write about it and make your case instead of
abusing 'Ask HN'. You're not asking anything, just insinuating.

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kawsper
I don't know, but I did think the same thing, and that is why I uninstalled
it.

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buildmystartup
They send a weekly emails with chunks of text they corrected so that means my
data is being transferred somewhere. I would stay away from this service.

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fredley
What's one more keylogger?

Your OS is already logging your keystrokes, your browser is already logging
your keystrokes, who even knows what else is already logging your keystrokes.

Obviously I speak here for the majority of computer users, I imagine many
(most?) in the HN readership have taken steps to reduce the amount of
keylogging they are exposed to as much as possible already.

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microcolonel
Whose browser and OS is logging keystrokes? OSX/Windows users with
IE/Edge/Safari? Are you insinuating that Google has a patch which integrates
keylogging in their Chrome builds of Chromium?

I typically use Chromium on OpenBSD, am I being keylogged. I'm pretty sure we
all have a choice, and many of us choose convenience over privacy.

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jowsie
You should take a look at the kind of js that gets injected into most
mainstream websites nowadays.

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zemo
attaching an event handler to a keyboard action is not the same thing as
keylogging...

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zer0tonin
If it's on all keyboard actions, then it's the same thing.

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27182818284
Often it is this too, because of sloppy coding, not even malicious intent.
I've seen people implement JavaScript easter eggs that play a funny joke, but
in doing so the developers had created a keylogger by accident that was
logging everything you did on the site. Again, wasn't malicious at all they
didn't think about it at all.

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wx2018
I can totally see this being the case. They do have paid versions, I think
only the browser extension is "free"?

