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Comment by registeredcorn | Hacker News Reader

So, both of my phones have the following keyboard option:

"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.

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.

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Looks like Samsung is adding the Grammarly functionality to their built-in (still an app, technically) keyboard in an upcoming update, or they already have.

So now, very likely, both Samsung and Grammarly have access to everything you type on your phone.

Do you know that grammarly keeps this information and doesn't toss it after it's AI looks for patterns for training?

I'm not aware of any actual AI system for NL using on-line training -- this unlabeled, after all! So "after it looks for patterns" is more "after the next training batch runs", 30 days if they're GDPR compliant.

Thankfully there's a few open source keyboards.

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.

Both phones I was referencing were Samsung devices.

Yes, all your text is being sent to Grammarly servers. It's done over HTTPS, so no third party can see what you type in, only you and Grammarly see your texts.

That's really bad actually. Especially if they are storing it away in a database associated with your unique ID for surveillance for 3rd party companies and the government.

…until there is a security breach at grammarly

Hmm, so if I understand things correctly: The means of transmitting that information is (supposed to be) secure, but the information within it - if the means of transmission (HTTPS) is compromised in any way - means a third party would then be able to read that information. Right?

Yes and grammarly obviously reads it, since it works over the Internet. Do they store it? Probably not but read their TOS and obviously you have to trust them as well.

Why wouldn’t they store it? That’s a good mine of information in many different ways (product improvement, upselling, ad targeting, etc)

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