Ask HN: Do You Trust Grammarly?
I just received an email from them with many stats about my writing over the last week. It's pretty scary to see how much tracking they are doing.
Do you trust Grammarly? Are there any good alternatives?
I mean it's a service that basically tracks every word you write, and does so for what I consider a very small benefit. Even if you can trust Grammarly to be completely ethical today and in the future, no service can claim that it's completely secure from hacking.
All OSes have what is essentially the same service as Grammarly, without having to stream every word you type to a third-party service.
Yet for sure, I do not use it for anything sensitive or for work purposes. I do not really trust them.
I would not send all that data to the Red Cross, much less a fucking fly-by-night browser extension company that has no choice but to monetize it.
Not all of them! Excluding Ubuntu, and stuff like package management management and heartbeat is-the-internet-up pings, Linux doesn't phone home about anything, let alo--
>without having to stream every word you type to a third-party service
Oh, you mean the spellcheck part. Right, right, yeah.
Starting with Windows 10 Microsoft has been keylogging for the same reason and saving the data for themselves to use for whatever they want. I'd consider that a 3rd party personally.
http://www.renegadetribune.com/windows-10-quietly-logging-ev...
Otherwise, everything -- from Word's style tips, to these online tools are the death of authorial voice.
I mean to write precisely what I say. Not "to write what I say" because that's "more concise and easier for the reader". Precisely what I say, because that's more evocative of my frustration.
Even if you are a native speaker, these style and grammar tools can be educational and and improve your writing confidence (and catch small mistakes we all make).
Of course, accepting all the suggestions isn’t the right way to use language tools. The rules are applied mechanically, without taking intent into account.
And I would say even for native speaker, not only a tool like this is for educational and improve one's own confident, but also demonstrated you care about your reader. I have lost counts on how many typo/grammartical mistakes I noticed when I read company internal wiki written by native speakers.
grammarly:
> And I would say even for a native speaker, not only a tool like this is for education and to improve one's confidence, but also demonstrated you care about your reader.
languagetool (didn't recommend any changes)
> And I would say even for native speaker, not only a tool like this is for educational and improve one's own confident, but also demonstrated you care about your reader.
quillbot:
> And I would say even for native speakers, a tool like this is for educational and improving one's own confidence, but it also demonstrates you care about your reader.
gramara (an app I made):
> And I would say even for a native speaker, a tool like this is not only meant to educate and improve one's own confidence, but also demonstrate that you care about your readers.
The target market for these tools is professionals writing english as a second language.
A tool that can spot and let you fix minor 'it sounds wrong' issues ("big orange cat" vs "orange big cat") can be a confidence-booster if you're e.g. working at Google's Poland office, but doing all your professional work in english.
I don’t just want my voice to be communicated, I want it to be understood. Sometimes that means automated grammar checkers.
A large audience for these types of tools is people for whome English is not their first language (this includes me, so please forgive any spelling/grammar mistakes you may find). This audience may be very eloquent and stylistic in their native language, but learning languages (especially when you have passed your teens) is hard, and sounding professional and sleek requires a lot more effort than you might think.
Here's where Grammarly comes in. It reformats your sentences to be more consistent with your projected attitude, removing a ton of work for some people.
If it's used to fix whatever ESL word salad one writes, without using the corrections as a hint to improve one's command of the language, then I agree with you.
I know plenty of people for whom the tool is really useful -- my foreign-born wife for example. But were she to limit her native expression with the same kind of "simplifying" that the tool offers, I am sure she would not be perceived as having any kind of personality at all.
For me, when I write -- and I like to write -- I choose to break convention often. The tool frustrates me and wastes my time. Sure there is an audience for this, but I don't want to sound like everybody else. That's MY attitude.
...and reading the comments does make it sound like a key-logger ... so no, I can't say I trust the extension.
I haven't used Grammarly but this strikes me as class HN "I don't make mistakes" hubris. Have you never used a thesaurus?
> I mean to write precisely what I say.
I assume you were making up that suggestion but "I mean to write what I say." is would be a good improvement, and it's only a suggestion anyway.
I write what I mean to say
I mean to write what I say
As I said, it's something of a nit I'm picking, but the meanings are pretty different IMHO, even if most folks would assume that both mean the same thing.
> I mean to write what I say
is an improvement over,
> I mean to write precisely what I say
Then you haven't understood everything I meant to say. The mood in which I write is part of what I write. To remove it is to communicate less.
I'm not sure exactly what you're implying with this rhetorical question but, for the record, I wouldn't expect a well-educated native speaker to use a thesaurus.
And yet I do use a thesaurus from time to time, as well as a dictionary of antonyms.
And a simple dictionary as well.
Maybe your language is simpler, or you have a better memory/education.
I see it all the time on here about IDE features like autocompletion. "Why would I need that? I'm smart. I just memorise the entire codebase, don't you? Your intellect is laughable."
In British middle class society, where people have attended "good" universities, you don't use a thesaurus. It would be looked-down upon.
Incidentally, what do you use a thesaurus for? Is it when you've forgotten a word, or when you want to discover new words that might be apt?
Grammer checking is just extended spell checking. You could have great style, but gaffe something; use some combination of words because you were tired or distracted, or you made some bad edit, half of which was scrolled off the screen or whatever.
You could ignore most of the tips, but once in a while it could be that the suggestion you get from the software is exactly the words you wanted to write, but somehow fumbled. That's clearly valuable, and in a way that isn't dictating style to you.
Sometimes spelling errors cause grammar errors. So unless you're a perfect speller and typist, a grammar checking tool might be the one which actually catches your typo. This is because a typo can produce a dictionary word, or words.
Some (might be all, actually?) parts are open source as well.
This doesn't give me a good feeling that they are focused on privacy.
>Some (might be all, actually?) parts are open source as well.
I was pretty impressed with languagetool and set up my own server (as I'm not interested in sharing with random strangers).
I used it for a while (local server, Firefox addon), but haven't used it for a while.
Yesterday I noted that the Firefox addon was chewing a goodly portion of CPU (perhaps because the local server is down?).
As such, I removed the addon and won't be going back -- not because languagetool is bad, it works quite well actually -- but because it didn't add enough value to me (note that only applies to me) to make the CPU load worthwhile.
That said, I heartily recommend self-hosted implementations of languagetool!
A big bonus that LanguageTool has, is the seamless language switching. I can mix Czech and English texts and get right corrections for both.
Even with a degree in technical writing, I still find it helps. I overuse passive voice and unnecessary words, and LanguageTool flagging them as I write is useful.
The free self-hosted version you can download from https://languagetool.org/download/ lacks all the premium rules (several thousand rules for English, German, French, Spanish and Dutch) and AI-based rules.[1]
My suspicion is the basic self-hosted version may no better then what you would already get in something like LibreOffice.
[1]: https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool/issues/6750
The free rules are pretty good IMO, I never used Premium and free was already on Grammarly’s level when I switched many years ago.
Safes effort with maintaining an installation and keeping the background process running. Plus, it also works when network connectivity drops.
https://github.com/Erikvl87/docker-languagetool/blob/master/...
I wish this were true.
My team still uses it despite my attempts to get them to do otherwise.
I wouldn’t trust any company with sending every keystroke (almost) to the company’s servers. That’s why on iOS I don’t use any custom keyboards, and even if I try any, I don’t give them “Full Access” (which means it can send the keystrokes over the network).
I also want to note that we don't make money by selling user data (never have and never will), which some of the messages here seem to imply — we do it by selling subscriptions to Grammarly Premium and Grammarly Business. We process text to be able to provide the service. More here: https://www.grammarly.com/trust
I don’t care how little data you’re storing. I type passwords into my browser and as a software developer I will never be sufficiently confident that you aren’t accidentally getting sent username and password box text even if you tried your damnedest to avoid it. The problem is you’re a keylogger. Ostensibly one with a positive reason your customers install you, but you fundamentally are a keylogger.
I cannot trust such an application… ever.
Grammarly is a security risk, and while I’m sure you’re all working hard to mitigate this as best as you can, you cannot eliminate certain fundamental security risks that are inherent in sending blocks of text to a third party, even manually sending a block of text contains a small level of risk that it could contain information you forgot (for a large block like a document) or included by accident without noticing (for a small block) and so it just cannot be eliminated.
Grammarly has difficulty correcting even basic grammar mistakes. I would never trust for anything beyond being a basic spellcheck and last minute hygiene check before you hit publish.
No, I don't trust grammarly. On top of the surveillance, it often makes grammar mistakes!
But I am not sure of the correctness in the advanced stages.
As others have said, the browser extension is an unmanageable security risk and we prevent its use and installation.
I'm not entirely sure if it's a feature that only comes with Google Workplace, but as part of the Workplace admin interface we get a nice UI for managing all of this.
... then ask yourself why you think country of origin even matters when it comes to your privacy given the past 20 years of both government and corporate surveillance.
Where do you write that doesn't have the grammar correction built in from the OS? If I ever want to check my grammar or language (this is quite rare), I just write it out and then put it in some online grammar checker like QuillBot. Works well for me. I have trust issues
EDIT : I would happily try out some self hosted ones though. I will keep going through the thread here.
1. A tool like grammarly is super helpful for the majority of non-english speaking population. So, this is not something like Facebook that we can just ignore and boycott. This is a truly useful category of tooling.
2. But, sending everything that the user types over wire and predicting with a heavy model that can only run on massive servers is evil.
3. The only viable alternative is either come up with a tech that encrypts data over wire, such that sentences cannot be decontstructed back at the server, but knows what indices in the client string. should be replaced - I'm not even sure if something like this is possible.
4. Just ship the entire model to the edge, so that no data gets transferred. Google has managed to ship a light-weight model to its Picel devices, apparently but I'm not sure effective this could be: https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/10/grammar-correction-as-you-...
I know this will sound very entitled, but it also sort-of bothers me how such tools might make everyone's writing, even with poor writing skills, look uniform so that it is harder to read between the lines and know what kind of person you're dealing with...
Is Grammarly a keylogger? What can you do about it?
Also, because I developed some sort of gag reflex when I see anything related to them after being forced to watch their ads repeatedly for months.
Replace 'Grammarly' with 'a keylogger'.
Would you trust it now?
Are you absolutely sure that it would not 'spell check' your master password and send it over to their servers without someone else looking at them and what website, field you were typing it on?
Now would you trust it even more?
Consider buying a copy of The Elements of Style by EB White and William Strunk Jr. It's a tiny book that you can read cover-to-cover over a weekend.
Apply the concepts in the book.
You're all set.
It’s in the interest of GitHub’s business not to leak private repositories. People give them money for the product.
Grammarly is a keylogger masquerading as a free writing aid. Fundamentally fishy.
So it's also in their best interest not to anger their paying customers.
Edit: That doesn't mean they won't, or that they should be trusted, just that they have similar motivations to Github.
I've been avoidant of anything that does similar since, it really shaped my view of privacy instantly seeing (all my own) passwords, private messages, heck even delete and tab key presses, everything being dumped to a log file in real-time.
Imagine if they got hacked.
tldr: too creepy for me