[HN Gopher] Is Grammarly a keylogger? What can you do about it?
___________________________________________________________________
Is Grammarly a keylogger? What can you do about it?
Author : terracatta
Score : 236 points
Date : 2022-02-25 18:28 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kolide.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kolide.com)
| mastermojo wrote:
| I'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.
| 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.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| The 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.techre...
| staplung wrote:
| I 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."
| paulpauper wrote:
| It is the biggest botnet ever. How do you think they are paying
| for ads everywhere. The money have to come from somewhere.
| copperx wrote:
| The subscription price is high ($30/month, last time I
| checked). If that isn't turning a profit, I don't know what
| will.
| Graffur wrote:
| Why would anyone pay for that?
| geoelectric wrote:
| They 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 wrote:
| Enterprise. That's a cost that just doesn't matter.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Turn employees from noticeably not able to pull off the job
| to sort of pulling it off.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| I 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.
| andrewl-hn wrote:
| Their 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.
| lbriner wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| The 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.
| belter wrote:
| Previous serious security issue:
| https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=15...
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| Second question: Is TextExpander a key logger as well?
| corobo wrote:
| Does it send the data anywhere?
| SllX wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| I guess I try to follow least permissions principle
| everywhere; no matter what it gets and where it sends - but
| good point.
| corobo wrote:
| Not 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
| taviso wrote:
| Hah, 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
| pjot wrote:
| I like to use write-good[0] - it takes a glob and prints
| suggestions to stdout.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/btford/write-good
| riedel wrote:
| One can run language tool [1] also on premise (or directly on
| one's machine).
|
| [1] https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool
| rpdillon wrote:
| Grammarly 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
| taftster wrote:
| Right, 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.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| By the normal definition, that is plagiarism. It is even
| plagiarism if the person was the original author of the
| pasted paragraph and it came from another work.
| umanwizard wrote:
| I disagree about your example not counting as plagiarism if
| the original source is not cited.
| JoeJonathan wrote:
| Agreed--if that paraphrased or rewritten text isn't cited,
| it's absolutely plagiarism, by any academic standard.
| luckydata wrote:
| what's wrong with the grammar check in google docs?
| _jal wrote:
| I 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.)
| dathinab wrote:
| For 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.
| latchkey wrote:
| Not saying good or bad, but they do have a page on their "trust":
|
| https://www.grammarly.com/trust
| 1over137 wrote:
| Is there a list of Grammarly servers, so it can be blocked, for
| example, at a corporate firewall?
| oxff wrote:
| It absolutely is an intelligence carve out.
| verdverm wrote:
| I 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.
| Arubis wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| uoaei wrote:
| NLP 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.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Reminds me of a scifi book where the Internet-analogue is
| so corrupted with junk deliberately injected by filtering
| services so that they can sell you the filters that it's
| impossible to use "naked".
|
| 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).
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I guess we're entering a new phase of language evolution,
| then; whether we want it or not.
| wyldfire wrote:
| Maybe we should create a neural network model that could
| label arbitrary text as -- nah!
| Tyr42 wrote:
| That's a Gan but with more steps right?
| NateEag wrote:
| Well... 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 wrote:
| Most, not all.
| [deleted]
| terracatta wrote:
| Totally 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 wrote:
| I use it, but only as a suggestion.
| leetcrew wrote:
| does 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.
| Teever wrote:
| > does it actually matter that people don't all the grammar
| rules or how to spell things?
|
| 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.
| diputsmonro wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| nescioquid wrote:
| > if you understand my intent, then I have used language
| effectively.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Teever wrote:
| You're not even wrong.
| leetcrew wrote:
| > It does if you hold the view that teaching someone to
| speak and write is teaching them them think.
|
| 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.
| exikyut wrote:
| > _does it actually matter that people don 't all the
| grammar rules_
|
| No.
|
| * _ducks_ *
| leetcrew wrote:
| ironic, but it actually supports my point so I'll leave
| it that way :)
| Silhouette wrote:
| _does it actually matter that people don 't all the grammar
| rules or how to spell things?_
|
| 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.
| apazzolini wrote:
| Yes, 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 wrote:
| Though 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 wrote:
| okay, 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.
| not1ofU wrote:
| I for one blame the Grammar-Nazis and their anti-semantic
| ways
|
| ok, i'll let myself out.
| beambot wrote:
| Even worse: entirely new language primitives based on 10wpm
| mobile keyboards.
| Spivak wrote:
| I 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.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Despite 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.
| syshum wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| we 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.
| bananamerica wrote:
| English is not my first language. Grammarly greatly improved my
| English, even when I'm not using it.
| lbriner wrote:
| You 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.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Also if you're not native speaker how do you know if the
| computer's suggestion is an improvement or a regression?
| witrak wrote:
| I 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.
| hef19898 wrote:
| One 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.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| It's the same with English. Maybe it's confirmation bias,
| but I've noticed many non-native speakers either write too
| formally, or choose the wrong synonym for the context.
| Everything is grammatically correct, but it just _feels_
| wrong.
| a_e_k wrote:
| My wife told me that when she was studying Russian in
| college, some of the professors in the advanced courses
| would refer to certain phrasings as the "spy's variant."
| kohllision wrote:
| This 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.
| tasn wrote:
| I 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.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Yeah, 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]
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| What 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.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| > Learn to write. Don't use Grammerly.
|
| *Grammarly.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| Oh dear! I walked right into that one didn't I? :'D
| dymk wrote:
| Well, it's Grammarly, not Vocabarly or Spellarly
| toomanydoubts wrote:
| How about non-native English speakers that are using it as an
| way to take tips and improve their English writing?
| lbriner wrote:
| There are plenty of ways to improve your English without
| grammarly.
| Spivak wrote:
| Yes 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.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| I'd argue that's even worse for non native speakers. It's
| alluring, really I see it. This would be massive amounts of
| utility if I were trying to learn French.
|
| But the cost is it's not actually natural, it's what the AI
| says is natural.
| bananamerica wrote:
| Yeah. Grammarly greatly improved my English.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Years 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 wrote:
| What does it even offer that MS Word doesn't? Word has all
| sorts of grammar and style checking.
| gnicholas wrote:
| For 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.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| The obvious one: integration with every text box on your
| system.
| [deleted]
| dylan604 wrote:
| Which 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>
| registeredcorn wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| fbrchps wrote:
| 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.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Do you know that grammarly keeps this information and
| doesn't toss it after it's AI looks for patterns for
| training?
| andrewl-hn wrote:
| 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.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| 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.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| ...until there is a security breach at grammarly
| pedrovhb wrote:
| > the text was sent to Grammarly's server unencrypted
|
| What does this mean exactly? That they were using HTTP instead
| of HTTPS, or some custom unencrypted format?
| bdcravens wrote:
| It may have nothing to do with the protocol. It can mean that
| everything Grammarly receives, no matter how transmitted, is
| unencrypted, in the same sense that this comment I sent to HN
| is. Of course this makes sense, but I think the difference is
| in the expectation of what is and isn't sent.
| boppo1 wrote:
| > wanted me to use it as a sort of proof reader.
|
| 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.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| The goal is not to make famous writers write like
| journalists. It is to make people who struggle with writing
| write at the level of journalists.
| geocrasher wrote:
| I can't imagine working in a place like this.
|
| I couldn't either. I don't work there anymore.
| iak8god wrote:
| > I often write with some unusual but perfectly valid grammar
| constructions that are a result of being well read.
|
| 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.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| That doesn't have to mean, and in fact should NOT mean,
| bland.
| Spivak wrote:
| You're missing the value-prop of Grammarly -- to help someone
| _who doesn 't know_ write more like a fluent native English
| speaker. Helping someone write "more average" is exactly the
| point until they're fluent enough to know when and how to
| break the rules.
|
| Wait until you find out about the 5 paragraph essay that's
| taught in HS that follows this model.
| dathinab wrote:
| > who doesn't know write
|
| 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.).
| badrabbit wrote:
| I feel like I can't function without it. Grammar mistakes can
| be seen very badly by others. If only being able to understand
| the other person was sufficient.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I have a relative with severe dyslexia who is a native
| English speaker. I wonder if grammarly could help him, even
| with things like spelling, too.
| ctennis1 wrote:
| My previous role was at a public facing ecommerce site. One day
| I started noticing a lot of public traffic to internal
| administrative endpoints that were failing - likely bots, but
| also to URLs that bots would have never known existed. Urls
| that only someone internal to the company would even know
| existed, due to the complex way they were crafted. It was very
| concerning.
|
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Did something like grammarly attempt to correct your post
| here?
|
| >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.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| Perhaps another site that person visited frequently was
| stealing their Grammarly auth token with this bug?
| https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-
| zero/issues/detail?id=15...
| altdataseller wrote:
| Why is Grammarly keeping track of the urls you visit when it
| has nothing to do with checking your grammar?
| lozenge wrote:
| Are you writing blog posts or message board comments? Are
| you on social media? Writing to one person or many? Are you
| writing for financial, health, tourist industries, or for
| your academic qualifications? To entertain, persuade or
| inform? A screenshot of the page can be reviewed and
| classified later.
|
| All to improve the service, of course. You know, what they
| say in the privacy policy.
|
| (Note: I have no insider information)
| BbzzbB wrote:
| I mostly wonder how? Is it an extension or program? I
| thought it was just a website where you can paste in a
| text-box for proof reading, and that sort of website
| shouldn't be able to track you everywhere afterwards,
| right?
| skellera wrote:
| It's also a browser extension and extension for things
| like Microsoft Word.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Yes. Don't use it, and require that contractors not use it
| either.
|
| I've found attorneys using it - automatic dq for me.
| copperx wrote:
| Does dq mean dequeue? Ironically, Grammarly would automatically
| expand your in-house abbreviations to make your writing more
| clear.
| SaltySolomon wrote:
| DQ = Disqualification, a no go.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Sweet.
|
| 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.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| The article explicitly calls out that kind of behavior under
| the subtitle "Don't Just Ban Grammarly and Expect Folks To
| Listen". I know, the whole article is sort of promotional, but
| the point still stands.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| People say stuff like this all of the time. It's just noise
| unless your relationship with the provider addresses whatever
| risks you have.
|
| 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?
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| The whole article doesn't gloss over those points; it is
| rather critical of Grammerly except for the last part. But
| also it, in my opinion, correctly points out that the
| security measure can't be separated from the social measure
| in that last part.
| parhamn wrote:
| While 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 wrote:
| It 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".
| uoaei wrote:
| Isn't it plainly obvious that they take all your inputs and feed
| it to their models?
|
| Isn't that literally the point of Grammarly?
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| It'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.
| duxup wrote:
| For 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| gxt wrote:
| In Quebec 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.
| bquinn wrote:
| Hmm 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...
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| Incidentally, using Grammarly is verboten, internally at a more
| famous company whose name also happens to start with a G.
| jjav wrote:
| Yes, 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).
| agrunyan wrote:
| In 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
| nalekberov wrote:
| I 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.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| It 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
| bleuchase wrote:
| Yes? Not use it?
| morganslaw wrote:
| Could you use Grammarly keylogs to train AIs? It could have
| infinitely more content than the web has.
| tlarkworthy wrote:
| This 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.
| xvolter wrote:
| I used Grammarly in the past and I stopped because the privacy
| issues were concerning. I switched to
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It would have been good if he asked how long grammar checked text
| is retained to grammarly / an engineer that works on it.
| [deleted]
| trevcanhuman wrote:
| Related blog post I made:
|
| http://trevcan.duckdns.org/blog/rant-writing-tools.html
|
| It talks more about morality and not legality.
| dathinab wrote:
| The 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).
| dghughes wrote:
| I 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.
| colbyhub wrote:
| I've seen people promote Language Tool as an alternative:
| https://languagetool.org It appears to be open source and you can
| host your own server!
| shade wrote:
| You can also run it in a Docker container and connect the
| LanguageTool VS Code extension to it. Works great for Markdown
| documents!
| subpixel wrote:
| How limited is the open source version? Or put another way,
| what besides convenience would drive me to pay instead of
| maintain an open source instance?
| Someone1234 wrote:
| I 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
|
| - 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"
|
| 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-... [1]
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest/corretto-8-ug/do...
| ismaildonmez wrote:
| I use LanguageTool daily since some years and it's been an
| absolute pleasure with both English and German. Add to that,
| the bugs I reported for both language were fixed in mere hours.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Yes! 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-
| dat...
| deutschewelle wrote:
| heiliger 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!
| terracatta wrote:
| This 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.
| motohagiography wrote:
| There ain't no reason I wouldn't never consider using Grammarly
| once, at least especially not now or whatnot.
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