You can use Grammarly in multiple ways. It’s available on its website or as a standalone application. In addition, you can install it as a browser extension for Firefox, Edge, Safari, and Chrome. It’s useful as an extra “pair of eyes,” as long as you don’t let it dictate your writing. I used it to check this article. Most of its suggestions were silly, but it caught a garbled sentence.

If you’re concerned with your security and privacy, the website is the safest. You can be reasonably sure it doesn’t have access to anything except what you type or paste into its pages. The browser extension is the most troublesome, since it can look at anything you do on a Web page. Before you install any extension, you should strongly trust its source not to do anything malicious or careless. Extensions can create security vulnerabilities with buggy code. This is especially a concern with an extension whose functionality is as pervasive as Grammarly’s. For all practical purposes, it functions as a key logger.

Grammarly denies that its product is a keylogger, but its arguments are evasive and nonsensical. That only convinces me they don’t understand security and are trying to lull their users. This concern isn’t just hypothetical; in 2018 its code had a bug that could let sites that you write for see what you’ve written for their competitors.

My recommendation: Don’t use the Grammarly browser extension.
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