Opinion: Are tools like Grammarly really safe to use?

When I first saw Grammarly appear, I thought “what a great idea”.

I signed up for an account and started using it, and really liked what it did for my writing. It seemed to work well, although it got seriously messed up sometimes. It really didn’t like it when I had a bunch of code on the screen. Overall though, I liked it.

But then one of my security-focused friends asked me:

Do you really want a browser extension that takes everything that you type and sends it to their servers for review? 

And when I stopped and thought about it, that’s really the last thing that makes sense to me from a security point of view. The problem is that the browser has no idea about what’s OK to send to the extension and what it shouldn’t.

Who knows what they do with all the data that’s sent to them?

I read their privacy policy and there are a lot of gray areas in there. But the bigger problem is that there’s a bunch of data that I just don’t want sent in the first place.

Now I could use the icon in the browser toolbar and keep turning it on and off but that’s not going to happen because I’ll forget to do it when I should.

I think what I’d like to see is just an option where I could highlight a chunk of text, right-click it, and say “Analyze at Grammarly”. I could be OK with that.

Would love to hear what you all think. Comment here or ping me offline.

2019-10-15