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Comment by beckingz | Hacker News Reader

I look forward to the day when PowerPoint is banned due to enterprise security concerns.

How about Grammarly? Or G-suite? They have access to most of the companies out there. I find it terrifying people use Grammarly and it has access to every piece of confidential word written.

Grammarly and Hola VPN are the two browser extensions that any IT Admin should be ban straight away in corporate machines.

You guys allow users to install browser extensions?

Grammarly should absolutely be banned. Their privacy policy is horrible.

I'd suggest companies look into LanguageTool's "On-Premise" commercial offering or run the Java-based server themselves (with N-Grams). Is it as good as Grammarly? Nope, but it is "90%" as good and significantly more private.

G-Suite is a super interesting case in that you literally cannot use the product without handing over your data to Google. It certainly seems like companies would hate that, particularly those with data protection obligations. Google does theoretically require a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) if your use case is subject to HIPAA and you intend to store or transmit PHI using their services, but I don't know how they detect or enforce that. [1]

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[1]: https://support.google.com/a/answer/3407054?hl=en

Since when does complying with data protection mean "you must own your entire tech stack and run it on prem"? Google[0] states that they don't use your data for anything more than running the service, and there are multiple pages detailing how they secure data on their servers from both employees[1] and attackers[the rest of the document].

0: https://workspace.google.com/learn-more/security/security-wh...

1: https://workspace.google.com/learn-more/security/security-wh...

It will only happen if people in a position of power ( most of the PowerPoint users) start to use another tool by their own liking/organic decision.

Which it's not going to happen anytime soon, so PowerPoint can literally be a bomb inside their organizations they'll still insist in using it.

If these phone-home allegations are true it's one more case where you spend $50K in an hightech driveway gate but have no fence around the property.

Enterprises who care will just disable it via group policies.

All closed-source software can do this, and so must be assumed to be doing this in any context where it matters.

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