
“Summary of why Grammarly are predatory and you should avoid them” - ofgtr2201oot
https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1104132993893904386
======
Zanni
Ugh. He makes some good points, but the framing is incendiary. "Summary of the
Grammarly privacy policy, and why you might want to be cautious" would be
better.

~~~
deogeo
Absolutely not. Spying on this level shouldn't be normalized with "be
cautious". If anything, the framing is understated.

Obligatory 1984 reference: "Summary of telescreen functionality, and why you
might want to be cautious."

~~~
Zanni
I think you need to reread 1984. Telescreens _were used_ to spy on the
populace. That's more than _potential_ indicated by overly broad language in a
privacy policy. No one's made the case that Grammerly _is_ spying, hence
"predatory" is inflammatory.

~~~
deogeo
"No one's made the case that Grammerly _is_ spying"

According to their privacy policy and the twitter reply ("Grammarly does not
store all processed text, we do not use text to do anything but provide and
improve our service"), they keep at least some of the text.

So they log your text, but it's not spying - so when does it become spying?
When the first warrant is served? And when that happens, will it not be spying
because "you agreed to it by using the service, it was all spelled out in the
'overly broad' privacy policy"?

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asciimo
Grammarly's response:
[https://twitter.com/Grammarly/status/1104504155991793664](https://twitter.com/Grammarly/status/1104504155991793664)

~~~
deogeo
Correct me if I'm wrong - doesn't that response basically say "Our policy lets
us do all the things you listed, but we totally won't, trust us lol"?

And of course yes the cops can read all of it, but "only if the warrant is
totally legit".

And warrant requirements are a poor defense:
[https://www.popehat.com/2014/07/15/warrants-bulwark-of-
liber...](https://www.popehat.com/2014/07/15/warrants-bulwark-of-liberty-or-
paper-shield/)

------
aboutruby
"Summary of why [most chrome extensions] are predatory and you should avoid
them"

Any extension can auto-update to change whatever they want, especially when
already given the "Access your data on all websites" permission.

Browser extensions are a security nightmare.

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leowoo91
I haven't tried the grammarly but how else could they serve the purpose if
they wouldn't get the text, fix and send it back? I think that's the core
feature of the product itself.

~~~
koyote
I think the author's main point is that they save all the text on their
servers indefinitely.

Also back in the days you did not need to send all your data to a server in
order to do some processing on it and I believe Word still has an built-in
grammar/spell checker that works just fine without all your documents being
sent to Microsoft.

~~~
BFLpL0QNek
Yes, this annoys me.

Yes to use their service I need to send them text, they can't process it if I
don't although it would be nice if they offered an offline app, even at a
price.

However it's annoying how they store documents and try to be a document
management / basic authoring system to, I see no reason why they should need
to store documents.

It also seems they are missing a trick. If Grammarly opened up their API's,
there are so many integrations that people can freely write and drive more
paying Grammarly customers. At the moment I copy and paste from my text editor
into Grammarly and back out! I never installed the browser extension for the
same reasons the originally twitter poster mentioned, i selectively copy and
paste in to the app.

~~~
laughingbovine
> although it would be nice if they offered an offline app

They have a plugin for MS Office and probably some other word processors.

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OldJackHinson
I saw today someone had Grammarly installed during a conference call. They
were entering HIPAA-protected data into an internally-managed Jira instance,
which presumably was being vacuumed directly up into Grammarly's database.

This might be a much bigger issue than I had considered :(

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laughingbovine
IDGI... this is what Grammarly is supposed to do. Take your text and fix
grammar/spelling/etc. How are they going to read your text if you don't send
it to them? IANAL but I'm fairly sure they can't steal your copyright and if
you're worried about them keeping data on you, then I have news about the rest
of the internet you are not going to like...

~~~
cmmartin
They could read your text, provide their service and then discard it. Instead,
they store it indefinitely. He states this explicitly right here
[https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1104132997110878208](https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1104132997110878208)

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aaomidi
Whats a good alternative?

~~~
joezydeco
A high school level English class?

~~~
aaomidi
I mean, this is just an unnecessarily mean comment.

Not everyone has the luxury of going to high school in an English speaking
country. Not everyone is strong in English but still need to write properly.

Thanks though.

~~~
joezydeco
If you watch Grammarly's advertising, the core market seems to not be English
language learners but college graduates that are having a hard time deciding
between the usage of "were" and "we're".

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak-Y56SfkS0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak-Y56SfkS0)

Snark aside, there are plenty of English grammar resources that can be
consumed in book form or online without attending an American high school or
compromising your privacy. A solid one is the Chicago Manual of Style:

[https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html](https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html)

~~~
aaomidi
This isn't the type of stuff Grammarly helped me with. Passive voice misuse is
still extremely difficult for me to catch. Even after learning about it
multiple times.

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Gravityloss
Google gets everything I type on Android, am I correct?

