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Is Grammarly a keylogger? What can you do about it?
- mrjin 5y agoDon't use it and all concerns resolved.
- staplung 5y agoI feel like their slogan should be lifted from Mr Lee's Greater Hong Kong: "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."
- verdverm 5y agoI think worse than keyloggers is that people are learning how to make the yellow lines in Grammarly go away rather than learning to write better. The training of humans on AI which was trained to be a (dull) average of prior humans has unforeseen consequences. I've seen Google grammar suggestions getting worse with time.
- terracatta 5y agoTotally agree, we already have a generation of folks who don't know how to spell without the crutch of a spell-checker (I include myself as a victim), does Grammarly produce even worse outcomes? 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.
- rhino369 5y agoI use it, but only as a suggestion.
- beambot 5y agoEven worse: entirely new language primitives based on 10wpm mobile keyboards.
- Spivak 5y agoI mean "txt" speak is something only my parents still use. There are some shortenings like omw, ngl, ikr but they're not inventing new words. I mean hell if this is the straw than the internet ruined that before I was born -- tldr, imho, afaik, mfw, /s.
- beambot 5y agoHeh, now it's just emojis and memes for communication.
- adhesive_wombat 5y agoDespite the moral panic over the OG mobile keyboards in the noughties (remember the breathless "kids these days write txt spk, m8 in their English exams" headlines every year?), the pandemic of inability to "write good" never actually materialised among Millenials. 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.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoThe same thing happened in the 19th century when coded abbreviations to save money on telegrams became a fad and infected everyday writing. Newspapers and periodicals both celebrated and decried them. Civilization didn't collapse. TTFN.
- LAC-Tech 5y agoWell WWI happened towards the very end of the telegraph age, so civilisation did collapse.
- leetcrew 5y agodoes it actually matter that people don't all the grammar rules or how to spell things? an english sentence contains a lot of parity data. when you do know all the rules, it can be painful to see the mistakes people make, but confusing "principle" with "principal" or using "who" when you should have used "whom" doesn't really obscure the meaning of the sentence. 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.
- apazzolini 5y agoYes, clarity and grammar matter. For example, with your lack of capitalization, I wouldn't know if you were trying to help your Uncle Jack off a horse or your uncle jack off a horse.
- NateEag 5y agoThough no one has ever written either of those sentences for any reason other than to put up a strawman to tear down in their defense of grammar. 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.
- leetcrew 5y agookay, you can also come up with plenty of examples of ambiguous parses that don't require violating any grammar rules. fortunately humans are a bit more intelligent than compilers and can use their knowledge of context to settle on the more reasonable interpretation.
- jamiek88 5y agoBut why make other humans do extra work to parse you? It’s arrogant in the extreme to say ‘that’s good enough you figure it out’. 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.
- syshum 5y agoI know, we should also get rid of Calculators because people should just do all math in there head 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...
- Barrin92 5y agowe use calculators because you can't do the kind of arithmetic in your head that calculators are made to perform, and because random arithmetic isn't conducive to understanding math. If you can't add two single digit numbers any more I'd start to be concerned. 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.
- sacrosancty 5y agoYou can see that's false by the existence of languages with simpler grammar than English whose users are still able to function to as high or a higher level than English speakers. Some of the grammar in English is redundant. We shouldn't waste our brainpower on it any more than on mental arithmetic/etc.
- Barrin92 5y agoI don't necessarily disagree but that doesn't have much to do with my point. Simple or complicated grammar, you as a person having command of it rather than outsourcing it to a tool is a skill you need often. 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.
- tasn 5y agoI couldn't agree more. Every now and then I let gmail auto complete for me, but it feels like my writing is just becoming generic.
- mhitza 5y agoYet, I've used the same closing line for my emails for years. And Gmail still doesn't suggest it as completion. "AI powered".
- Arubis 5y agoThis may be the case, but "this tool is a potentially massive privacy and security intrusion" is a drastically different conversation than "calculators mean students can't do arithmetic anymore".
- mattnewton 5y agoI think "calculators mean students can't do arithmetic anymore" is perhaps an uncharitable take because it ignores that calculators aren't also trying to learn arithmetic from examples of people using them. Eventually grammar correction algorithms will injest text written with them or other grammar correction algorithms as ground truth in their efforts to improve and adapt to new idioms- this may already be the case.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- uoaei 5y agoNLP researchers are tearing their hair out about this right now, since people are posting mountains of GPT/etc.-generated text online with no easy way to distinguish whether it's of human or other origin.
- NateEag 5y agoWell... you can read it. 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.
- aaaaaaaaata 5y agoMost, not all.
- uoaei 5y agoThat has been true up until very recently, but lately there has emerged an uncanny valley that has confused the distinction between "underpaid freelance (ESL) writer farm" and "shoddy but roughly convincing neural language model" so that you may be convinced the blogspam you may happen upon across the internet may just as easily be computer-generated as anything else.
- bananamerica 5y agoEnglish is not my first language. Grammarly greatly improved my English, even when I'm not using it.
- lbriner 5y agoYou might be worrying a bit too much about what others think. I am English and if someone is, say, Russian, and writes to me in English, I don't care if their grammar is a little poor. The great thing about English is you can understand even when most of the words are in the wrong order :-) 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.
- witrak 5y agoI think you skip the case when both communicating parties are not native speakers which is probably much more often case than when at least one side knows English well. And risk related to a misunderstanding caused by breaking grammar rules is much higher.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoAlso if you're not native speaker how do you know if the computer's suggestion is an improvement or a regression?
- bananamerica 5y agoIt is possible to have relevant knowledge in languages that are not your own.
- hef19898 5y agoOne of the beat ways to tell really peoficient foreign speaker of, in my case, German isn't the accent (as some people don't have one anymore) but a too perfect Grammar usage, either in writing (less obvious) or speaking (clear as day). I yried one of the German grammar tests of my son, and failed miserable, despite being a native speaker. My wife isn't, and she's so much better in German grammar then I am. 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.
- kohllision 5y agoThis is comparable to the argument that programmers are learning how to eliminate compiler/linter warnings rather than learning how to program better. Immediate feedback is the best learning tool and one leads to the other. Of course, natural languages are far more complex and have no universal standard. While it is true that no easy way to check for style, be it in programming or writing, we should encourage the use of such tools (once they are secure and privacy-friendly) as writing assistants.
- voakbasda 5y agoNo, it’s comparable to your compiler/linter suggesting fixes when it spots issues. Pointing out an error is one level of knowledge, suggesting a fix is not in the same class. Take away the grammar tools’ ability to make suggestions, and you have something equivalent. You still have to know how to math/program with a calculator/compiler.
- greggsy 5y agoHaving been subjected to a thrashing early on by a really good editor, they will stress that their isn’t always to correct and re-write your work - they’re often there to mark areas that need clarity or don’t fit the norms of editorial standards. 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.
- lifeplusplus 5y agomy grammar actually improved from proof-editing my essays on grammarly
- colbyhub 5y agoI've seen people promote Language Tool as an alternative: https://languagetool.org https://languagetool.org It appears to be open source and you can host your own server!
- terracatta 5y agoThis is really awesome, love that they don't mystify the tech and make it accessible to folks who want to have control of the data.
- shade 5y agoYou can also run it in a Docker container and connect the LanguageTool VS Code extension to it. Works great for Markdown documents!
- rpdillon 5y agoYes! I looked into languagetool last week to see if I could host it locally on my Synology. They have an interesting page about how, after setting up the initial 200MB install, one can enable n-gram checks[0], which requires an additional 8GB of storage and an SSD. I haven't tackled that yet, but it's on my list! [0]: https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-data https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-dat...
- deutschewelle 5y agoheiliger strohsack! this is a good suggestion but the site itself seem to be very much like Grammarly or am I mistaken here? The golden chalice appears to be a self-hosted solution!
- Someone1234 5y agoI run the local server works well as a spelling/grammar checking when using the ngrams. About ten gig in size total. The browser extension is just so-so, I don't love the UI even now but considering the privacy and quality it is hard to be disappointed, there's nothing else out there. If anyone wants to get set up fast on Windows: - Server Doc/Download Link: https://dev.languagetool.org/http-server https://dev.languagetool.org/http-server - ngram Doc/Download Link: https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-data 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" Set path just adds jre8 to bat's path context (there are multiple other ways to accomplish this). "start" just hides the black cmd window while the server is running. --languageModel must be the fully qualified path to the 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-windows-jre.msi https://corretto.aws/downloads/latest/amazon-corretto-8-x64-... [1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest/corretto-8-ug/downloads-list.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest/corretto-8-ug/do...
- anonymouse008 5y agoSecond question: Is TextExpander a key logger as well?
- corobo 5y agoDoes it send the data anywhere?
- SllX 5y agoThere is a cloud component, but in this case it’s syncing text expansions you saved to it making it more like 1Password than Grammarly.
- anonymouse008 5y agoI guess I try to follow least permissions principle everywhere; no matter what it gets and where it sends - but good point.
- corobo 5y agoNot a point, honest query. 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
- rpdillon 5y agoGrammarly seems insidious to me. Not only does it intercept the final versions, but all drafts of what users write. I know they sell a plagiarism product to schools[0]: > 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. [0]: https://www.grammarly.com/edu https://www.grammarly.com/edu
- luckydata 5y agowhat's wrong with the grammar check in google docs?
- _jal 5y agoI believe they're referring to the part where they send all your writing to a HugeCo with a voracious appetite for information about its users and a weaselly, mutable privacy policy. (Anyone remember when FB was caught sending itself unsubmitted data from web forms? Seems almost quaint now.)
- taftster 5y agoRight, imagine in the context of education, that a student is drafting some essay or whatever. In the process, that student might copy/paste some text from another article and then will go on to rewrite the text into their own language. 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.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoYeah, it still absolutely blows my mind folks allow Grammarly anywhere. It's horrifying from a privacy and security standpoint. I get requests to install it at work from time to time, and then have to basically explain that it would be illegal for me to allow it. I would argue if you're subject to any sort of data security compliance policies, you can't allow Grammarly on your systems.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bjt2n3904 5y agoWhat can you do about it? 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.
- toomanydoubts 5y agoHow about non-native English speakers that are using it as an way to take tips and improve their English writing?
- bananamerica 5y agoYeah. Grammarly greatly improved my English.
- lbriner 5y agoThere are plenty of ways to improve your English without grammarly.
- Spivak 5y agoYes but if people are gravitating towards Grammerly it's because it's offering something those other ways aren't. 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.
- josourcing 5y ago> Yes but if people are gravitating towards Grammerly it's because it's offering something those other ways aren't. 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.
- Spooky23 5y agoYes. Don’t use it, and require that contractors not use it either. I’ve found attorneys using it - automatic dq for me.
- copperx 5y agoDoes dq mean dequeue? Ironically, Grammarly would automatically expand your in-house abbreviations to make your writing more clear.
- nobody9999 5y ago>Does dq mean dequeue? Ironically, Grammarly would automatically expand your in-house abbreviations to make your writing more clear. 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. And since I (or anyone else) can't know what's in your mind unless you tell me, I may take an abbreviation[6] to mean something (like Dairy Queen) that the writer didn't intend. [0] https://www.dairyqueen.com https://www.dairyqueen.com [1] https://www.dairyqueen.com/en-us/menu/treats/classic-treats/ https://www.dairyqueen.com/en-us/menu/treats/classic-treats/ [2] https://www.metmuseum.org/ https://www.metmuseum.org/ [3] https://www.metopera.org/ https://www.metopera.org/ [4] https://www.met.police.uk/ https://www.met.police.uk/ [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookfield_Place_(New_York_City) 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).
- morganslaw 5y agoCould you use Grammarly keylogs to train AIs? It could have infinitely more content than the web has.
- paulpauper 5y agoIt is the biggest botnet ever. How do you think they are paying for ads everywhere. The money have to come from somewhere.
- copperx 5y agoThe subscription price is high ($30/month, last time I checked). If that isn't turning a profit, I don't know what will.
- Graffur 5y agoWhy would anyone pay for that?
- aaaaaaaaata 5y agoTurn employees from noticeably not able to pull off the job to sort of pulling it off.
- geoelectric 5y agoThey have annual subscriptions that get sharply discounted on a regular basis, where it comes out closer to $70 a year. I pay for that, since I usually do need the editing help, but the linked article certainly gives me pause.
- rubidium 5y agoEnterprise. That’s a cost that just doesn’t matter.
- speedgoose 5y agoSpellchecking by humans is more expensive and not instant. Grammarly is something between the classic software spell checkers and professional human spellcheckers. 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.
- belter 5y agoPrevious serious security issue: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=1527 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=15...
- 1over137 5y agoIs there a list of Grammarly servers, so it can be blocked, for example, at a corporate firewall?
- parhamn 5y agoWhile I don’t use it for the sake of privacy, folks saying “learn to write” are missing the point of grammarly. It’s an editing tool. Editing is remarkably difficult to do on your own writing. Ask any published author.
- slg 5y agoIt is especially funny in a community with as many software engineers as HN. Imagine saying a developer who uses a linter or has to make changes to their code as part of a PR review should just "learn to code".
- jrockway 5y agoHonestly, that's a thing. The Go "readability" process at Google involved static analysis commenting on your code, and you got "readability" (the ability to approve other people's PRs) when it didn't have anything to say for several changes (among other more human criteria). You couldn't run this linter yourself before it was auto-run, so it did act as a check against making the same mistake over and over again on your own. (I think I figured out how to run it, though.) 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.)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- i67vw3 5y agoI regularly use such tools (usually when writing formal stuff) as I usually mess up my grammar, tense, punctuations and some other stuff.
- uoaei 5y agoIsn't it plainly obvious that they take all your inputs and feed it to their models? Isn't that literally the point of Grammarly?
- duxup 5y agoFor some of us it is something we might think is likely. I don't think it is that obvious / people would know that outright.
- rpdillon 5y agoI think it's more a case where many users only see one side of a dual-use technology...they don't necessarily even know how it works, just that they can install it and it checks grammar for them. It seems a bit like visiting the local dump for the first time as a kid: the sheer amount of stuff being collected in one place that came from everyone's homes can be really impressive, even though you knew all along that it had to go somewhere every time you took out the trash.
- Consultant32452 5y agoIt's not obvious (to me) that all the "thinking" is done in the cloud. I would've assumed it was all local to your machine.
- uoaei 5y agoIs it a native app, an Electron app, or a webapp? I don't even know because I refuse to get anywhere near it. 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.
- charcircuit 5y agoIt would have been good if he asked how long grammar checked text is retained to grammarly / an engineer that works on it.
- Lascaille 5y agoYou wouldn't get an accurate answer to that if there were any sort of shenanigans going on. It's a pointless question. 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?
- cosmiccatnap 5y ago
- geocrasher 5y agoYears ago I worked at a company where many people were using Grammarly. One of the top devs took a look at it, and saw that the text was sent to Grammarly's server unencrypted and warned everyone not to use it. Some still did. 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.
- HPsquared 5y agoWhat does it even offer that MS Word doesn't? Word has all sorts of grammar and style checking.
- CGamesPlay 5y agoThe obvious one: integration with every text box on your system.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dylan604 5y agoWhich is exactly the very very scary prospect of the thing. Giving Word this ability while using Word makes sense. Giving some other software access to 100% of everything that occurs on the system is very unnerving. <shudder>
- gnicholas 5y agoFor all the years that I used Word, its grammar checker used incorrect rules for when to use "which" and "that". 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.
- ctennis1 5y ago
- xvolter 5y agoI used Grammarly in the past and I stopped because the privacy issues were concerning. I switched to https://www.antidote.info/en https://www.antidote.info/en, which works entirely on-device, without sending your data to a cloud service. They now do offer a fairly minimal web application that can be used if you have their subscription, but they offer a one-time purchase for the desktop application. 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.
- mastermojo 5y agoI'm on the team at Sapling Intelligence, a deep-learning AI Writing Assistant. A lot of privacy and security conscious folks don't like the idea of a keylogger, so we have self-hosted/on-premise/cloud-premise options for businesses. We have a list of available offerings here: https://sapling.ai/comparison/onprem https://sapling.ai/comparison/onprem. Sapling deployments can also be configured for no data retention, sacrificing some model customization. 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.
- hansel_der 5y agofixed that for you: A neural-network based grammar checker doesn't make sense.
- TheRealPomax 5y ago> Cost-wise, it doesn't make sense for individuals to host a neural-network based grammar checker 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".
- hombre_fatal 5y agoWell, I think you'd first have to know the resource requirements, and it's reasonable that so few people would be willing/capable of running it that it doesn't make much business sense to focus on that as an option. I'm certainly curious to know.
- omnicognate 5y agoI'm not an expert and would appreciate being corrected if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression using a neural network after it has been trained typically requires relatively little computation and data. It's training it that takes the big compute and requires lots of data. 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.
- ramesh31 5y agoI have long suspected Grammarly as a massive undercover FSB operation to monitor the west. The amount of marketing push behind the product never made sense otherwise, and their corporate HQ is in Ukraine. 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.
- lbriner 5y agoI have thought that one of the most effective spyware tools would be a really good open source library that most people will use without really knowing what it does and it sends your secrets to some bad government somewhere or at least gives them a master kill switch if they want to DDoS everyone.
- autoexec 5y agoThe more people there are using an open source library the more likely it is that someone is going to take the time to see exactly what it does and any unexpected network traffic (sending data to some bad government) will sound the alarm much faster. The most effective spyware tools are things like cell phones, facebook, Windows, and Google. They encourage people to spill their own secrets and make it difficult if not impossible to use them while protecting your privacy in any meaningful way.
- andrewl-hn 5y agoTheir corporate HQ is in the US, and they are hosted on AWS. 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.
- oxff 5y agoIt absolutely is an intelligence carve out.
- wodenokoto 5y agoThe Japanese government did disallow an IME from Baidu (a software that converts typed keys-strokes to Japanese kana and kanji), because it ran inference on a server. - https://web.archive.org/web/20140119231002/http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/asian-technology/japanese-government-warns-baidu-ime-is-spying-on-users/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140119231002/http://www.techre...
- dillondoyle 5y agoIt also injects html/junk into email editors. 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
- trevcanhuman 5y agoRelated blog post I made: http://trevcan.duckdns.org/blog/rant-writing-tools.html http://trevcan.duckdns.org/blog/rant-writing-tools.html It talks more about morality and not legality.
- taviso 5y agoHah, I use an old DOS grammar checker called Grammatik. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DMlaJ-ROXc
- pjot 5y agoI like to use write-good[0] - it takes a glob and prints suggestions to stdout. [0]: https://github.com/btford/write-good https://github.com/btford/write-good
- riedel 5y agoOne can run language tool [1] also on premise (or directly on one's machine). [1] https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool
- jjav 5y agoYes, grammarly is an excellent data exfiltrator, don't ever use it while typing anything you don't want published externally. 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).
- latchkey 5y agoNot saying good or bad, but they do have a page on their "trust": https://www.grammarly.com/trust https://www.grammarly.com/trust
- nalekberov 5y agoI am very proud I have always refused to use this kind of software, the question is "Is Grammarly a keylogger" is hard to answer per se, but it has always potential to collect enormous data about its users, it doesn't matter what they claim in their T&C, Facebook also started as a "just" social network, they ended up being one the biggest data collector of the world.
- npteljes 5y agoIt's not a hard answer, Grammarly IS a keylogger, vast amounts of sensitive data is being actively sent to them. Whether they abuse it, or get hacked so a third party can abuse it, is the question. Currently not that we know of. But the software itself facilitates it and that they provide value doesn't change this.
- dathinab 5y agoThe main problem is that Grammarly doesn't want their models/rules/etc. to end up out of their control, hence they do the checking on their server. 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).
- dathinab 5y agoFor German I want the Duden spell checker tool back. 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.
- gxt 5y agoIn Québec we have Antidote. It's a good "old" piece of software you install on your computer and it integrates with office and other programs to provide _explanations_ of why what you write, looks wrong. No keylogger, no getting dumber. It essentially let's you either learn why you're wrong or decide the software is wrong. It used to be French only but they added English too a couple years back. I have no affiliation with Antidote, I just use it everyday.
- twobitshifter 5y agoAnother older piece of software is the Unix Writer’s Workbench, which legend says put all other grammar checkers to shame. Unfortunately it seems to have been lost to history and I am too young to have used it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writer's_Workbench https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writer's_Workbench
- digisign 5y agoLooks like a good floss project to contribute to: > 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.
- pkd 5y agoThank you for this recommendation. I'll probably pick this up for French writing practice!
- pedrogpimenta 5y agoWell, it doesn't seem to be working: > It essentially lets you [...]
- gxt 5y agoI use it everyday, but I don't use it for everything.
- bquinn 5y agoHmm it seems curious that this attack on a successful Ukrainian startup is happening at this time. 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...
- josourcing 5y agoI doubt this has anything to do with Russia. Sometimes, all it takes is a little common sense and curiosity to even ask about these things. Or maybe the guy just read the TOS. Some people actually do that!
- drran 5y agoIt looks like Russians want to a) spread doubt, b) force users to look for alternatives, so they will find and install their trojans, to try them.
- agrunyan 5y agoIn Grammerly’s Privacy Policy[0], it states as part of information they collect: “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”. [0] https://www.grammarly.com/privacy-policy https://www.grammarly.com/privacy-policy
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dghughes 5y agoI have disabled any auto-correct, suggest, or any so-called aid in any app that I use. I found most often they are a hindrance not a help. For example suggesting wont instead of won't or its when 99.9% of the time I wanted it's. 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.
- woadwarrior01 5y agoIncidentally, using Grammarly is verboten, internally at a more famous company whose name also happens to start with a G.
- tlarkworthy 5y agoThis article misses the way I use it, which is much safer. I am security minded but also a terrible writer. 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.
- terracatta 5y agoI never considered this way of using it, but I can easily see how for a careful user it's a much better experience than using their standalone web app. I'll be sure to add a note about this to the article for future readers. Thanks for commenting.
- motohagiography 5y agoThere ain't no reason I wouldn't never consider using Grammarly once, at least especially not now or whatnot.
- bleuchase 5y agoYes? Not use it?
- kelsolaar 5y agoAs I was wondering where they are located: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=where+is+grammarly+located https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=where+is+... 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.
- m00dy 5y agoI installed its plugin on Microsoft Word and I feel a bit safe now.
- stereoradonc 5y agoTry out outwrite.com If you need a grammar correction.
- nickjj 5y agoI would never use it but this feels like a common issue in general which is trading convenience for privacy and security. 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.
- kazinator 5y agoI tried that once just to see what it's all about, and it kept regularly sending irksome e-mails ("We're not seeing any activity from last week") for, I think, well over a year.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y agoI used to use it in highschool. What I'd do is just copy/paste my assessment text into their web interface rather than installing their addon or desktop client. I'm not sure if they.offer.a web interface outside of their plugins/client apps these days.
- xony 5y ago
- heliophobicdude 5y agoIs anyone gonna bring up GitHub Autopilot?
- speedgoose 5y agoI use Grammarly and Github Copilot to write technical documents in VsCode (with vim mode). It's actually great. But the documents are very far from being confidential.
- politician 5y agoI saw an ad for Grammarly once, maybe a year ago, on YouTube. I was intrigued and clicked on it to learn about it and concluded that it was pretty awesome... until I learned about how it works and NOPE’d out immediately. 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.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoYou may have stumbled on a new form of activism: ad baiting. Wonder who pays the most for ad placement that's also deserving of being drained (in a small way) of funds.
- watwut 5y agoI think they just had campaign. I never clicked on it and had tons of grammerly ads at around same time.
- bluedino 5y agoWe had a ticket where someone complained about "latency" when cutting and pasting into Microsoft Excel. 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.
- jrm4 5y agoGenerally, Grammarly feels like a practical example of something humans want to believe AI will be very good at, but will eventually turn out not to be.
- scim-knox-twox 5y agoGood that we have LT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30379593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30379593
- langsoul-com 5y agoAll AI based systems that use your data to improve itself is incentivised to collect everything. Especially if it's free
- drran 5y ago@dang, This is Russian attack on Ukrainian Unicorn. Can you shadowban awakened bots?
- traes 5y ago...What? Is this incomprehensible to anyone else?
- amelius 5y agoHow long until OpenAI comes with an open replacement?
- ionwake 5y agoDoes most of the HN react the same way I did when I first saw an ad for grammarly? 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 ?
- JamesAdir 5y agoWhy is different than Gmail auto complete?
- funshed 5y agoI'm sad to read this. As someone who is dyslexic, it's a necessary evil I have to use. Unless there is alternatives? Infact I use Hemingway App and then Grammarly to write content.
- artur_makly 5y agolet me get this straight.. it is listening to every key input i make on my mac regardless of the app i am in? then sends this data to its cloud? im assuming this includes passwords? if so, how is this app still legally available to the US consumer?
- elias94 5y agoI’m the only one that saw Loom having access to the webcam in the article? 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.
- azinman2 5y agoThe article suggests how could it all of the sudden read the Note after being turned on without new key presses — uhh duh the accessibility APIs it discussed? 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.