Should You Use Grammarly More?
I used to love Grammarly , a useful browser plugin that analyzes what you enter and identifies your bad spelling and grammar choices – so you can correct or ignore, depending on what kind of writer you are. In the end, I removed it after a few months because it seemed a bit resource-consuming, and I found that Chrome’s built-in spell checker was all I really needed.
More importantly, there has been a regular debate between Grammarly users and the company about which window Grammarly opens to your online life. After all, the extension works by analyzing what you enter. It collects this data, processes it, and (presumably) deletes it upon completion. While it sounds innocent on paper, and Grammarly swears by its privacy policy, it’s still a healthy dose of trust that you place in a company you don’t know anything about.
Can you trade the convenience of a grammar checker for the reliability of a company that claims to delete a huge amount of data you send to it? It all depends on your level of comfort. (Even so, companies with perfect privacy can have … problems .)
Before you decide to stick with Grammarly or leave, you should take a few minutes to see what data Grammarly has collected about you. Request a report of your personal data – a process that is not automated in itself, but runs through Grammarly’s regular support / ticketing system.
To Grammarly’s credit, it only took a few minutes for the company to generate my report and submit it. Since I haven’t used the service for a while and have never actually uploaded documents to be stored on Grammarly’s servers, I didn’t see any interesting data in it – no stacks of saved text from old Facebook posts or blogs. , or any other content previously verified by the Grammarly add-on.
Instead, my Personal Data Report mentioned when I created my account, which IP addresses I used to log into it (and from which locations), a list of Grammarly products that I used, and a brief description of my spelling statistics.
If you use Grammarly heavily, your report may contain more relevant information than mine, but you probably shouldn’t expect to see much secret stored text. You will have to make the decision to stick with Grammarly without understanding it, but it shouldn’t be difficult. Worse, you can always just copy and paste the copy you have questions about into something like the offline version of LanguageTool, or better yet, the Hemingway app .