<story><title>Is Grammarly a keylogger? What can you do about it?</title><url>https://www.kolide.com/blog/is-grammarly-a-keylogger-what-can-you-do-about-it</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boppo1</author><text>&amp;gt; wanted me to use it as a sort of proof reader.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;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?&lt;p&gt;Imagine running famous writers through this thing, even if they&amp;#x27;re just journalists. Gross. I&amp;#x27;m gonna run Moby Dick through Grammarly later and see what it has to say.</text></item><item><author>geocrasher</author><text>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&amp;#x27;s server unencrypted and warned everyone not to use it. Some still did.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t given mind-numbing work, the quality would have been better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chipotle_coyote</author><text>While I don&amp;#x27;t use Grammarly, this doesn&amp;#x27;t strike me as a very fair description of what grammar checkers are meant to do. Just like spellcheckers, they only make the changes you let them make. If you blindly accept every suggestion they make, then yes, I suppose you&amp;#x27;re running your text &amp;quot;through a statistical homogenization machine,&amp;quot; but that&amp;#x27;s even more foolish than blindly accepting every suggestion a spellchecker makes.&lt;p&gt;I &lt;i&gt;do&lt;/i&gt; use a &amp;quot;grammar and style check&amp;quot; built into Ulysses fairly frequently, even on fiction. This is a server-side service like Grammarly, but without the keylogging-ish aspects. (It only works in Ulysses, and you have to explicitly go into &amp;quot;revision mode&amp;quot; and click the &amp;quot;Check Text&amp;quot; button.) And, sure, it&amp;#x27;s optimized for business writing and is going to make a lot of dumb suggestions. But not &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; the suggestions are dumb; it really does catch genuine mistakes and even make style suggestions worth considering (e.g., &amp;quot;the phrase here is so overused it&amp;#x27;s in our database as an overused phrase, so are you sure you want to use it&amp;quot;). And, of course, sometimes I really &lt;i&gt;am&lt;/i&gt; writing something for business, and some of the suggestions that are superfluous in creative writing might actually be useful.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t like Grammarly&amp;#x27;s approach explicitly because of the &amp;quot;send everything to Grammarly in the background&amp;quot;, but I think people write off style checkers as pointless a little too quickly. Even the stupidest grammar checker, like the one built into macOS (sorry, Apple), will catch things like inadvertently doubled words, which is something I&amp;#x27;m prone to do when I pause in the middle of writing a sentence to collect my thoughts.</text></comment>
<story><title>Is Grammarly a keylogger? What can you do about it?</title><url>https://www.kolide.com/blog/is-grammarly-a-keylogger-what-can-you-do-about-it</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boppo1</author><text>&amp;gt; wanted me to use it as a sort of proof reader.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;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?&lt;p&gt;Imagine running famous writers through this thing, even if they&amp;#x27;re just journalists. Gross. I&amp;#x27;m gonna run Moby Dick through Grammarly later and see what it has to say.</text></item><item><author>geocrasher</author><text>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&amp;#x27;s server unencrypted and warned everyone not to use it. Some still did.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t given mind-numbing work, the quality would have been better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iak8god</author><text>&amp;gt; I often write with some unusual but perfectly valid grammar constructions that are a result of being well read.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s lovely for you. It sounds like you&amp;#x27;re very clever. However, most writing in the workplace is intended to communicate concrete ideas, and benefits more from clarity than cleverness.</text></comment>