I noticed that Grammarly isn't allowed on Amazon computers. When I went to check why, it turns out that buried in their TOS it says they essentially own everything that is typed into a Grammarly text box... They market this as a tool for businesses to help make their writing better, but no business in their right mind would allow the usage of a tool that essentially gives away IP for free? Am I misunderstanding this or is it really this bad? Does your company allow Grammarly?
I wish Amazon would create its own version of grammarly for internal use or like someone said on blind microsoft would integrate grammarly on ms word for business users. I wanted to use grammarly to check the emails I write before sending them out but manager said no.
I work at Grammarly and just wanted to clarify the misunderstanding: Grammarly doesn’t own what individual users or business customers write. Similarly to other cloud-based applications, there are clauses in our ToS that give Grammarly permission to process the text on our servers (we need to process it to provide writing suggestions), but users/customers never transfer ownership of their writing to Grammarly. That’s in the TOS in multiple places: e.g., “You retain all right, title, and interest in and to your User Content,” and in the Ownership section: “All intellectual property rights in and to the User Content are and shall remain your property, and Grammarly shall acquire no right of ownership with respect to your User Content.” Larger companies often prefer/require their employees to use only IT-approved software. If you want to use Grammarly, you just need to ask IT to review and approve it as a vendor. We usually have no issues with IT/infosec approvals at major companies. Someone just needs to initiate the process, and it's fairly straightforward from there.
Ah that makes a lot of sense, given the ML stuff that goes on for sentiment analysis, etc. It is interesting, Amazon specifically has Grammarly blacklisted, due to the perceived transfer of ownership...
It’s not so easy as “just need to ask IT to review and approve it as a vendor.” Companies like MSFT and AMZN have banned it due to violating critical security requirements and doesn’t seem like that will change unless Grammarly significantly changes the nature of how their product works which is unlikely.
It’s the SMBs and individual users like students which it targets. In other words, people who don’t care.