Is Grammarly a keylogger? What can you do about it?
kolide.com
kolide.com
At my previous engagement, a large number of staff spoke English as a second or third language, and Grammarly was prevalent. Even as a native English speaker, they wanted me to use it as a sort of proof reader. I'll admit that it caught some of my dumber mistakes, but I never felt comfortable using it. I could have proof-read my work better is all. Perhaps if I wasn't given mind-numbing work, the quality would have been better.
This issue may be fixed now, but I would never trust a grammar checker with such a lousy track record for basic issues like which/that.
We spent a LOT of time tracking down, and finally realized that the "bot" traffic was coming about 30 minutes after one of our employees legitimated visited the site. We found that user was using grammarly. Once we deactivated grammarly, all of the bot traffic stopped.
As best as I could tell, every URL that particular person went to in their browsers, grammarly had a service about 30 minutes later that would try and hit the url directly and ascertain what was there.
Haven't been on the crusade against it ever since.
I think it’s fine if you use the website with information you don’t mind sharing but their extensions are reading everything you write.
All to improve the service, of course. You know, what they say in the privacy policy.
(Note: I have no insider information)
> Ensure your work is fresh and original by checking it against 16 billion web pages.
How do they know what text is on 16B web pages? Presumably they have a web crawler of some sort.
Can confirm. Caught one of their bots on my site and called them out about it on Twitter.
They did not respond.
The page linked doesn't contain the text.
That alone doesn't indicate they collected the 16 billion documents themselves, of course.
>Haven't been on the crusade against it ever since.
You have been or you haven't been? It sounds like a contradictory statement from the rest of your comment.
haven't -> have, right?
I can't imagine working in a place like this. I often write with some unusual but perfectly valid grammar constructions that are a result of being well read. Running what I've written, the codification of my thoughts, through a statistical homogenization machine is dystopian in a way I had never imagined. What kind of business was it?
Imagine running famous writers through this thing, even if they're just journalists. Gross. I'm gonna run Moby Dick through Grammarly later and see what it has to say.
Wait until you find out about the 5 paragraph essay that's taught in HS that follows this model.
In my experience it doesn't.
It helps people who are already reasonable good at writing English to write slightly better. Through only if their writing is limited to "business" English.
For e.g. papers it's in my experience a catastrophe.
There are also multiple categories of errors it can't cope with and does bad recommendation for. It's the kinda of errors I'm doing a lot. Maybe due to having some dyslexia, maybe because it's my second language, or maybe because my brain thinks slightly different (not joking; Luckily it's just different, not worse.).
I always viewed the grammar checker as a crutch and only used it when required, but some students I worked with on team projects were obsessed with getting no warnings from the grammar check. There were a few ESL students that produced almost unintelligible work that had passed grammar check, and they argued with me when I tried to help them.
My best experience was when one instructor ran my work through the grammar check and then sent me the graded paper (A) which included his long critique of the changes the grammar checker had recommended.
That's not a part of the value of Grammarly. The tool is going to recommend mistakes; if you can't recognize them, then it will hurt you a lot more than it helps.
That's lovely for you. It sounds like you're very clever. However, most writing in the workplace is intended to communicate concrete ideas, and benefits more from clarity than cleverness.
>> any day of the week
Bland biz comms are not only acceptable but preferred.
Succinct writing with some humor or at least some character to it will actually get that functional spec read.
Joe Spolsky wrote a good piece on this topic: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/10/02/painless-functiona...
1) humor? it's subjective
2) you better be spot on because humor can easily be misinterpreted.
3) along the same lines, it's likely not everyone reading will be of the same native language and/or culture. Humor will likely marginalize them.
4) Frank Luntz "Words That Work". Chapter 1 is comms evergreen gold.
https://www.amazon.com/Words-That-Work-What-People/dp/140130...
I can't imagine working in a place like this.
Try comparing the text of a Great Illustrated Classic book to the text of the actual book it "adapts".
I do use a "grammar and style check" built into Ulysses fairly frequently, even on fiction. This is a server-side service like Grammarly, but without the keylogging-ish aspects. (It only works in Ulysses, and you have to explicitly go into "revision mode" and click the "Check Text" button.) And, sure, it's optimized for business writing and is going to make a lot of dumb suggestions. But not all the suggestions are dumb; it really does catch genuine mistakes and even make style suggestions worth considering (e.g., "the phrase here is so overused it's in our database as an overused phrase, so are you sure you want to use it"). And, of course, sometimes I really am writing something for business, and some of the suggestions that are superfluous in creative writing might actually be useful.
I don't like Grammarly's approach explicitly because of the "send everything to Grammarly in the background", but I think people write off style checkers as pointless a little too quickly. Even the stupidest grammar checker, like the one built into macOS (sorry, Apple), will catch things like inadvertently doubled words, which is something I'm prone to do when I pause in the middle of writing a sentence to collect my thoughts.
I parsed this sentence as you running Grammarly on the novel by James Joyce, which would be an interesting experiment given that Joyce deliberately changes his style and grammar to mimic famous authors of the day, sometimes mid-sentence.
> Running what I've written, the codification of my thoughts, through a statistical homogenization machine is dystopian in a way I had never imagined.
This is why Grammarly exists.
Tools exist to help us. Use them.
It's the classic case of removing all of the apparent errors which then results in the downstream system underestimating the actual quantity of errors in the source and thus not being vigilant for more critical errors. Sure, it makes people look better to their colleagues, but what happens when they need to communicate in person, or in cases like mistaken context for double negative? The receiver will be so impressed with the level of communication they receive that they won't expect basic errors might be made.
> An algorithm is isn't going to be able to clear up miscommunication more accurately than the person who receives the message.
The whole point isn’t accuracy. Grammarly improves the clarity and accuracy of the message so another person doesn’t have to. The recipient can focus on the message, not applying their superior ability to clear up miscommunications.
So, I tend to agree with you. Whether or not this person has tested Grammarly is somewhat irrelevant because they clearly don’t understand why it exists.
My guess is -- the improvement one might get from using Grammarly might be equivalent to "a faster version of, let me read a BUNCH of examples of similar writings to spark an idea of a better way to say a thing?"
In other words, it feels like the thing that Grammarly might be useful for probably lean "syntactical" over "meaningful?" Something like that.
Ultimately an organizational problem but I gotta say it gets very peeving to write 5 different solutions to the same ask because the other person is careless with their words.
What if he does? Do you like generalization?
"Suggest text corrections
Tap words or phrases underlined in green or tap the more menu icon when you see a green dot, to review grammar and writing suggestions.
Powered by Grammarly"
Does this mean that if I have text correction turned on while using the keyboard on my phone, because it is "powered by grammarly", it will be sending unencrypted information to Grammarly?
Personally, I couldn't care less if some giant company is reading my information, but I don't want that transmission being sent unencrypted.
Edit: I should mention that this is not an app that I have installed on my phone. This is literally just the text prediction for my keyboard by default.
So now, very likely, both Samsung and Grammarly have access to everything you type on your phone.
I've been checking out FlorisBoard, available on fdroid. Sadly, Google and Samsung keyboards are very good at swype/glide, FlorisBoard is coming along though, & I prefer to support it because the other two can't be trusted.
This is my method to write grammar sensitive content -
- Write initial draft in notepad
- Review the document
- Paste content into grammarly
- Review their suggestions
- Review the content one last time.
I just couldn't find anything that is non obtrusive and secure.
Edit: I read through the article. My method seems to be the most secure way to use grammarly. But I am deleting the extension and the app.
What does this mean exactly? That they were using HTTP instead of HTTPS, or some custom unencrypted format?
At first I was fooled by those productions since they had some non-zero amount of polish to them that looking back I realize is professional stock footage of some kind. Now I know it's junk faceless import products pretty much that are being peddled. There's a whole genre to them and it's funny now to see past them immediately when they appear, but irritating too.
Someone testing homegrown methods of blocking online advertising traffic on their own network.
I never see ads except when testing. I do not use an adblocker for downloading and watching YouTube videos. I use methods that work outside the browser. Adblockers require "modern", graphical web browsers.
"Modern", graphical web browsers are funded by online advertising.
I do not require a browser for accessing YouTUbe.
The one caveat here (which I try to cover in this post) is there are definitely people who suffer from things like dyslexia who heavily rely on these types of tools to be able to communicate confidently. In that way, they are very useful.
I mean hell if this is the straw than the internet ruined that before I was born -- tldr, imho, afaik, mfw, /s.
Indeed, it has been suggested that reductions like "wait" to "w8" even represent the same kind of phonological awareness of language that's correlated with better spelling.
when it comes to formal correspondence, spellcheck is always there to help. or better yet, get a copywriter or technical writer to help you and go back to your main responsibilities.
I'm a fan of learning grammar well, to be clear, and wish mine were better, but this is not a good argument for grammar mattering.
Even scanning text is jarring when the rules aren’t followed, takes extra time to comprehend and adds to the minor irritants of daily life and will have people judging you, even subconsciously, as unintelligent.
It does if you hold the view that teaching someone to speak and write is teaching them them think.
If that is correct than if someone does not know how to speak and write in a grammatically correct fashion then the implication is that they do not know how to think properly.
Even if there isn't a perfect 1to1 mapping between grammatically correct writing and thinking skills, I still think it's a good proxy for measuring a persons ability to think because in general the more you read, the better you get at writing, and the more you read, the more you know.*
* the traditional caveats apply with garbage in, garbage out.
I don't hold that view. at least, I don't think effective communication requires mastering the formal rules of a natural language. I'm not even sure communication itself is that closely tied to complex thought. I've known a few brilliant engineers whose english was barely sufficient for work. perhaps they were quite elegant in their native tongues; I wouldn't be able to say.
I think it does in some respect; our language's grammar and vocabulary litteraly govern the way we see the world, after all[1]. As a personal anecdote, I'm ESL and write as a hobby, both in my native language and English, and I do feel the differences (and limitations) in the way my mind works depending on language.
I know that my inadequacies in English mean that my style is different. Descriptions and reasonings are simpler. In my native language, I can easily use word plays, ambiguities, be bolder and "more clever" (or less stupid :p). In English, I unconsciously keep things less complex. I'm a different author, and so the worlds I describe in my texts are simpler, too.
English is also far more "pragmatic" than my birth language. I can't word things the same way. Thus, my thinking as an "English writer" is far more rational and cause-to-effect-ish.
It's like any tool: you can absolutely use a programming language through tutorial and google searches, but you have to truly master it to really understand its concepts, to really use it to do something cleverly and intelligently -- and you won't plan a complex task the very same way in two different programming languages.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110314132531.h...
> If that is correct *than* if someone does not know how to speak and write in a grammatically correct fashion then the implication is that they do not know how to think properly.
And you immediately defeat yourself with your own argument.
Nobody ever has, nor should strive to, follow every grammatical rule perfectly. Errors only matter if they create actual ambiguity; if you understand my intent, then I have used language effectively.
As human thought evolves, language should too. Poets are always breaking rules in the name of art, and many of those changes get codified as new rules. Shakespeare simply made up dozens of words that we use today without a second thought. Over the last decade, modern poets steeped in the culture of sarcasm have given the word "literally" a new meaning. Those deviations and inventions made sense, both to the speakers and listeners, so new words, rules, and understandings were created. The only people left confused are the prescriptionists who cling to outdated rules that describe how people used to talk.
As long as humans can turn these AI assistants off and share their imperfect creativity, I'm not too concerned.
I'll agree as far as it goes, but it ignores the burden of understanding on the the part of your interlocutor.
Have you ever been in a conversation where either you or the other party didn't speak the language well? It is a strain on all parties, even if sufficient information was transmitted and understood. I might consider this merely sufficient or barely "effective". I'd hope we aim for clearly expressing oneself without causing strain on your conversation partner or reader.
A good deal of what people quibble over regarding "grammar" has more to do with good style (whatever that means to you -- proper use of less/fewer, who/whom, capitalization and punctuation, etc) and achieving a certain verbal register.
Actually, this is untrue; people automatically follow the rules of their language with extreme accuracy. They don't "strive" only in that following the rules doesn't involve any conscious effort.
This is behind the principle articulated for HTML of "be strict in what you emit and liberal in what you accept". That is how people behave when speaking. But it's not something they're capable of doing in HTML, and trying to apply it there was a mistake.
> Errors only matter if they create actual ambiguity; if you understand my intent, then I have used language effectively.
This isn't right either, in a couple of more serious ways:
First, ambiguity is always present regardless of whether any errors have been made or not. A fun example of ambiguity I noticed recently is "Flemish is more influenced by French than Dutch". Perfect grammar, but the two obvious parses have opposite meanings. Ambiguity arising from a grammatical error is no more serious than ambiguity arising from a lack of errors.
Second, the major problem with failing to follow the grammar of a language is that it prevents your audience from knowing whether they understand you or not. One thing I can say if you speak to me in broken English is that you aren't aware of the rules of English. Given that, even your apparently flawless sentences might have been intended to mean something quite different from what they would mean if spoken by an English speaker.
You can't possibly be serious! If this view is based on your real-life experience then I am amazed at the rarefied circles to which you belong.
https://www.thinkimpact.com/literacy-statistics/
- Nationwide, on average, 79% of U.S. adults are literate in 2022.
- 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2022.
- 54% of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level.
- 34% of adults who lack proficiency in literacy were born outside the US.
Based on these stats, you can rest assured that at least half of the adults in the United States do not have perfect grammar. And although "proficiency" is not precisely defined, I think it's safe to assume that a majority of these low-literacy adults are native speakers.
How much effort did it take you to select the form 'am' in 'I am amazed' while selecting 'is' in 'this view is based'?
When's the last time you heard anyone make a mistake in conjugating be?
That's what a grammatical rule looks like.
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2008/09/09/ebonics-time-and-te...
No.
*ducks*
ok, i'll let myself out.
Does it matter if someone does not write with perfect grammar and spelling? Probably not.
However at some point you have drifted so far from normal conventions that you are no longer communicating effectively. You can make reasonable arguments about both prescriptivism and descriptivism but if your spelling and grammar are so bad that someone can't understand you then you're not a descriptivist, you're just wrong.
I have encountered this more often than I'd like in professional settings. I work in software development, a field where precision is important, so if I'm looking at your job application and it's full of basic language errors then I absolutely will judge you for that.
Hell let get rid of computers as well, people should just do everything manually, if you need to communicate drive to the person an talk to them, if you need to write something get out the hammer, chisel and rock...
</endsarcasm>
No Computers, Spell Check, nor grammar check has not ruined civilization or made people stop learning things...
Having a proper understanding of grammar and spelling is relevant even in verbal communication. Tools should be used to augment human capacity, not used as an excuse to justify atrophy of basic skills.
It's irritating how often people even confuse "your" and "you're" nowadays. Some simplifications are harmless but plenty of them can change meaning. And it seems like texting and autocompletion makes people care less and less.
"AI powered".
I might be wrong, but so far I think it's been pretty easy to tell if text came from a human or a deep-learning system.
Granted, that probably doesn't scale well.
Thanks for sharing!
Obviously the corpus (perhaps 1 trillion to to 10 trillion words?) will be exhausted by a sufficiently large model so there’s an upper bound.
I think it's either Neal Stephenson or maybe Stephen Baxter, but I'm not sure which book it was an aside in (it's not Fall, I haven't read that yet, though that appears to have a similar idea).
The best mathematician in the world will probably get the same answer I will on a calculator. At most maybe I'll get an irrelevant rounding error.
If there was only one good way to state any idea, no matter the context or intent, it would be different.
I could choose not to use grammarly if I had something to hide, with little trouble. It doesn't do anything most can't do themselves, or anything a local FOSS checker can't do once browsers start integrating them as they probably will someday.
The real danger would be a world in which I can't legally choose not to use it or for some other reason it is no longer a free choice.
Is journalism not part of how we prevent that?
Also, most English people don't know much about grammar anyway and lots of people still confuse things like there/their/they're; are/our; its/it's etc.
The gist: Don't worry too mich, just use the language. Most people are than delighted to meet a foreigner trying to speak their language.
If they just fixed everything for you, you wouldn’t improve at all.
This experience made me much more careful about the way I write, and who I write for.
> The GNU operating system contains free software implementations of several wwb utilities, such as spell, style and diction.[9] As of early 2019, the look utility had not yet been ported to GNU, but its implementation from 4.4BSD-Lite is available as free software, for example via Debian.
> It essentially lets you [...]
Cost-wise, it doesn't make sense for individuals to host a neural-network based grammar checker, though some of the rule-based options may work. There's a future where if we can maintain some sort of Moore's law scaling we will be able to run these language models on individual computers as opposed to the cloud.
Why?
We already do the same in the photography world in the form of apps like Topaz Labs' denoise/sharpen/gigapixel, as well as video enhance. Why would I care how many gigs of disk space and even a GPU might be required for an NN grammar checker if it literally makes back the money by improving the writing that influences my career? Hell, I can expense what is needed to run this if the payoff to my company is "the quality of work is better, and more secure".
I'm certainly curious to know.
I think many services like Grammarly would be perfectly possible to implement without sending your data off device. There are just massive incentives not to.
While the training (e.g. the part necessary in order to even have a product) is incredibly resource intensive, and will yield a model that's typically hundreds of megabytes, actually applying the resultant model to new data takes milliseconds at most for plain text analysis.
A neural-network based grammar checker doesn't make sense.
This sounds like it's a bad story, but I thought it was a decent system. (I was a readability reviewer for Python, and I wish I was as consistent as the bot.)
Similar to Grammarly, the growing use of AI-based pair programming tools, like Github Copilot and similar, poses similar serious privacy risks. While the intelligent autocomplete is helpful, it uploads large parts (or all) of your source code; which most companies should be very concerned about.
I would argue if you're subject to any sort of data security compliance policies, you can't allow Grammarly on your systems.
This happens with a lot of choices. Smartphone vs flip phone, using an Alexa or similar device vs not, etc..
A fully offline Grammarly would be a really nice app to have. I'd pay something like $49 a year to have access to that if it worked really well and was kept up to date. The hard part is "really well", it's so much more than detecting spelling errors with a Vim plugin. At the same time I have a feeling the "goodness" of a tool like this is only because of how much data it can harvest to train its algorithms and models which makes me think it won't happen until accurate models are in the public domain.
Have been using them for over 10 years.
Cannot recommend enough.
It works well enough for me, I use it with mutt instead of ispell. Naturally, it's 100% offline.
I made a (terrible?) unboxing video a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DMlaJ-ROXc
Since then, though, they aggressively bid to put ads on my browser. It’s a win-win for me, the ad networks get to feel like they’re delivering highly relevant personalized ads to a potential buyer and I get the peace of mind of not seeing other ads and the feeling of doing a good deed by baiting Grammarly into wasting ad spend. Selling a key logger as a service—- it’s an abomination.
Isn't that literally the point of Grammarly?
I don't think it is that obvious / people would know that outright.
If either of the last two, it seems inevitable that their engineers would push as much of the compute server-side as possible to retain fidelity at the keystroke level.
We really should be doing a better job about demonstrating the distinctions between locally-run and -hosted tools, and cloud tools, for novices and laypeople.
Back when Facebook started pushing everything server-side it was a pretty obvious change if you were on a bad connection. When you'd type in a form on a bad connection it would often re-populate text that you had just deleted, or move the cursor around to unexpected places, presumably to match back up between their server-side caches and the local state. In the early days my adblock was interfering with this, too, which made the issue more apparent and caused some very strange behavior.
After some quick tests yielded the expected results, the person selected an entire paragraph of text and pasted it into a cell.
Sure enough, there was about a 3-4 second delay as the Grammarly add-in sent it in for analyzing.
Imagine if you had confidential data in your documents.
I’ve found attorneys using it - automatic dq for me.
I’m sure the subject of a confidential investigation that could result in losing custody of their children would appreciate that Grammarly simplified that jargon in some attorney’s report. No problem at all that it’s stored in the cloud somewhere, monetized, or reviewed by some contractor somewhere.
I thought it meant "Dairy Queen[0]." Yummy[1], yummy Dairy Queen!
Using shortened/abbreviated forms without explanation is a recipe for misunderstanding.
Generally, writing out whatever will be abbreviated/shortened and noting the abbreviation/shortening is preferred, as it removes the ambiguity of just using an abbreviation.
For example, If I say that I'm going to "The Met," that could mean I'm going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art[2], the Metropolitan Opera[3] or The Metropolitan Police[4]. Which institution is implied may be clear from the context, but could be confusing.
Many years ago, I shared a taxi with a couple on my way to work at American Express. When I said I was going to "Amex," they assumed I was going to the American Stock Exchange and since their offices were quite close to that organization's offices, we decided to travel together.
Fortunately, the offices of American Express and the American Stock Exchange were both in the World Financial Center[5] (albeit at opposite ends), there wasn't an issue.
That said, clearly identifying shortened forms is extremely important, especially in writing, as you can't correct a reader's assumptions as to what you're going on about.
This applies to "dq" above, as well as many other acronyms and abbreviations. This article[6] discusses the issue at some length:
Most abbreviations do require a definition. In
any case where readers might be confused by TLAs
three letter abbreviations), it's important that
they be defined in the text or in a Table of
Abbreviations. A research proposal or article
with complicated and confusing abbreviations is
one that will quickly face rejection. The problem
is that authors become so familiar with
abbreviations that they forget to define them.
[0] https://www.dairyqueen.com
[1] https://www.dairyqueen.com/en-us/menu/treats/classic-treats/
[2] https://www.metmuseum.org/
[4] https://www.met.police.uk/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookfield_Place_(New_York_Cit...
[6] I'm using "abbreviations" here to mean abbreviations (e.g., Amex for American Express), acronyms (e.g. NAFTA for North Amerian Free Trade Agreement) and initialisms (e.g., TCP for Transmission Control Protocol, FBI for Federal Bureau of Investigation).
You don’t just ban it, you attach sanctions to it. Third party disclosure of legal work product is not so good for your legal career.
Would you be happy if the people administrating your health benefits, medical records or taxes were using some random free SaaS that accessed and processed your data without accountability?
How about your attorney? If you were facing criminal prosecution, would you want the information and metadata (how documents were revised) about your case to be subpoenaed and available ton the prosecutors?
> Grammarly's integrated plagiarism checker instantly catches plagiarism from over 16 billion websites and ProQuest's proprietary databases.
So it's pretty clear that collecting and processing lots of semi-private writing is part and parcel to their business, which seems like a recipe for trouble sooner or later. To be clear, I have similar reservations about grammar check in e.g. Google Docs, so this is not limited to just Grammarly at all.
(Anyone remember when FB was caught sending itself unsubmitted data from web forms? Seems almost quaint now.)
By normal definition, this wouldn't be plagiarism, so long as the student extrapolates and restates the original text. And ideally, the student would cite that source, but it probably doesn't happen.
Grammarly might be able to catch this "mistake" - because it would see the copy/pasted text in the first revision and then potentially flag the final outcome.
I'm not saying that plagiarism detection is all that bad of a thing. Teachers need some level of support to help keep their students honest. But there's too much information, in my opinion, being sent when you use any sort of keylogger tool or online editor.
Is it because it messes up the ability to figure out what analysis was done when, and what you had access to at the time, and makes it look like older work has the same trustworthiness as newer work that might be done with different equipment or access to sources or new experience?
Depends on how much they changed it.
> It is even plagiarism if the person was the original author of the pasted paragraph and it came from another work.
Nah that concept can go screw itself.
[0]: https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-dat...
The golden chalice appears to be a self-hosted solution!
If anyone wants to get set up fast on Windows:
- Server Doc/Download Link: https://dev.languagetool.org/http-server
- ngram Doc/Download Link: https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-dat...
I've had success with Amazon Corretto jre8 64x for my Java[0][1] and I use this bat file to launch it upon reboot (put it in the same folder as languagetool-server.jar):
SET PATH=C:\program files\Amazon Corretto\jre8\bin\
start javaw -cp languagetool-server.jar org.languagetool.server.HTTPServer --port 8081 --allow-origin "\*" -l en-US --languageModel "C:\LanguageTool\LanguageTool-5.4\ngram"
You can automate executing this script either using Windows' scheduled tasks or just putting a shortcut to it in the Startup Folder (Win+R enter shell:common startup).
And don't forget to re-configure the browser extension. The setting is in Experimental Settings -> LanguageTool API Server URL -> Local Server
[0] https://corretto.aws/downloads/latest/amazon-corretto-8-x64-... [1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest/corretto-8-ug/do...
It's Spanish demo only highlights some mechanical punctuation, gender, and plurality errors though it has one useful suggestion for a word that is too specialized.
Useful, for sure, but Grammarly is much more helpful, pointing out things like run-on sentences, clauses that lack parallel verbs, and things like that. Maybe it's better in English, but hopefully Language Tool can get to that level one day.
If a person needs a server to figure out grammar, it's time to go back to school or crack open an English book.
Eg, Log4j vulnerability was found by, Chen Zhaojun of Alibaba Cloud Security Team. His first language is probably Mandarin, while English is 2nd or 3rd Language. He then mailed the Apache team via mail. He would have used such tools for this important mail to properly deliver and explain what exactly he found.
This highlights perfectly the danger of tools which send data to a cloud service and why they should never be used in such a context.
An email coming from a respected source that has 'warning urgent vulnerability' will be given due consideration regardless of the grammar used.
“User Content. This consists of all text, documents, or other content or information uploaded, entered, or otherwise transmitted by you in connection with your use of the Services and/or Software.”
and yet they don’t define this as a keylogger. I do understand keyloggers record everything a user types and Grammerly claims to not read “sensitive fields”.
- https://web.archive.org/web/20140119231002/http://www.techre...
My spelling has become terrible and all my life I have been great at spelling. My grammar is OK I thought it was great until I went back to college and felt like I was illiterate.
In college I did try Grammarly mainly for its plagiarism tool. But Grammarly like a virus it's very difficult to uninstall. I caught many mistakes in grammar like "for free" and "off of". And Grammarly plan was supposed to be monthly $20/month then it jumped to $300 US dollars one year-plan automatically charged to my credit card. I didn't notice and after a month they said it was impossible to refund my money. Pure greed, scam, spammy junk.
I also realize I'm tempting Skitt's Law just by mentioning all this.
"Whether seriously in business or on a fun-loving hijink, make yourself totally homely in this meager environment. If any aspect is not utterly harmonious, gratefully bring it to my notice and I shall strive to earn your satisfaction."
I have Grammarly as a browser extension that is OFF BY DEFAULT, except, when I am writing on Medium, and a few times when I click to enable it temporarily.
Problem solved! I feel this article is not serious about a the "What you can do about it". I am fairly confident I have sensitive information controlled, yet I do get the very real benefits when I write a blog post.
I also copy and paste markdown into the standalone web app occasionally because it can correct markdown without getting tripped up by syntax! I am very happy with the quality of grammarly corrections and I do think it is possible to use it safely, just not with its default settings.
Thanks for commenting.
I'm not sure if they.offer.a web interface outside of their plugins/client apps these days.
But this means it MUST BE a key logger, how else could it work?
But tbh. what irritates me the most, is how bad their product is.
At least with this type of errors I do (some dyslexia, English being the second language, and me having some uh bad past with English in school).
Like the "corrections" they recommend (which go beyond what a "dictionary" spell checker is able to do) are often wrong and will result in another wrong text.
It's pretty obsessed with writing in one specific style.
It seems to have some major problems with listings.
It also seems to want to change anything with some subtle undertone to a version without it.
I would say maybe for people already somewhat good at English which do not make the kind of errors I often do, writing soulless "business" English, it might be good.
If it wouldn't be a major risk to confidentiality.
I do not trust a company like Grammarly (or most companies) to be cable of defending their IT infrastructure against professional attackers, and subtle backdooring Grammarly seems quite useful (for certain actors).
Btw. same for 1Password it's a supper juicy target, especially if it adds a crypto wallet (as they plan to do).
Also I'm pretty sure the usage of Grammarly for writing letters to customers is in conflict with more then just the GDPR (if they contain sensitive information, in more then one way).
Producing well-written documents is essential if you want to appear competent and professional. Using tools is helpful, especially when you are not a native speaker.
I remember just thinking that it would definitely be logging my text and recording my internal endpoints.
Is that a normal thought or would most of HN not expect this ?
Learn to write. Don't use Grammerly. That's the article. Instead, we keep trying to find little tricks to keep the utility without surrendering privacy.
High school and college essays are already full of enough mindless fluff and tropes. Why put everything you write into something that then makes you sound like a bot? Your essays will all end up with YouTube Face.
I mean I guess you can learn an instrument by reading sheet music and sheer force of will but I think most people prefer lessons.
I disagree. Grammarly has bombarded the internet and YouTube with so many ads, there are ads that make fun of Grammarly ads.
Nevertheless, people don't use it because it offers something that others don't. They use it because they don't know any better.
Even in this discussion, most suggestions for "better" is completely useless advice of "learn to write".
But the cost is it's not actually natural, it's what the AI says is natural.
*Grammarly.
I've never been to school, and I probably wouldn't use it for anything like an essay in real life, but it seems good when brevity is the main critical factor and sounding like a bot is expected.
I rarely ever see writing outside of actual books, and pre-2008ish news articles that specifically impresses me though, so maybe it's not the best for anything that matters, bot style writing does get pretty painful to read for hours.
Loom can open your webcam and record you audio if they want…
So grammarly is offering this service thanks to the cloud and thanks to the data transmitted over internet. We cannot do nothing else that trust this companies. We should maybe ask to our government to check and validate how our data are treated by companies and if the privacy is respected.
My personal rule would be if it sends data anywhere yes, if it logs the key press data locally yes too (also why) otherwise probably not but never say never
Seems all very overblown to me. It’s known to begin with that it sends things you type to the server - that’s the model (or rather, how they run their models). That does not automatically mean evil things are happening.
Even if you don't buy the conspiracy theory, the cold hard truth now is that those servers will be under Russian jurisdiction within a month.
They have a development office in Ukraine, too, but they have evacuated. Even if Russia takes over they won't get access to your writing.
Our staff use it. Having typos in political emails is bad and super duper stressful. On the whole I think worth it for our use case.
But when you look at the actual draft email html there is almost always some grammarly fragment left like pseudo html elements and stuff
The easiest way to do that (instead of being constantly aware) is to just never use it (or anything like it that sends all your private typing to somewhere else).
German has more strict rules for a lot of it's grammar, which can be checked rather well without needing any AI.
It ran local.
Or maybe I'm just nostalgic.
But as far as I remember it was the best spell checker I ever had (for any Language).
But then I'm hardly writing German now-days.
http://trevcan.duckdns.org/blog/rant-writing-tools.html
It talks more about morality and not legality.
Infact I use Hemingway App and then Grammarly to write content.
Could it be a Russian smear campaign? It seems like the sort of thing that the St Petersburg disinformation teams would attempt, in very subtle ways...
Or maybe the guy just read the TOS. Some people actually do that!
Also, considering how unlikely it is that any particular sentence a user has typed is unique, would it count as 'storing that text in a database' if the text you typed remained in their systems in a tokenized fashion, i.e. incremented a sentence use counter?
San Francisco, California
The software is produced by Grammarly Inc, which is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with offices in Kyiv, New York City, and Vancouver.if so, how is this app still legally available to the US consumer?
If you need a grammar correction.