The Sanity Project

Privacy and security concerns in Grammarly

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Note: This is the most popular post on my blog. I wrote it in 2020 and can’t guarantee that it accurately reflects Grammarly’s current state.

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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The AB-5 nightmare begins in earnest 1

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It’s real now. California writers are losing work because of AB-5, which outlaws or restricts many kinds of freelance work. WriterAccess has sent an email to its California writers, which tells them:

  • They’re capped at 35 orders or projects for any one customer. There’s no size limit to a project, but it all has to be under one title.
  • All California writers must register as a business with the state and get an EIN for tax filing.
  • California writers will have to submit a revised business agreement with WriterAccess to ensure compliance with the new requirements.

To its credit, WriterAccess is trying to keep its California writers and give them as much leeway as it can. Other platforms are simply dropping California-based writers because they’re too much trouble.
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Constitutional challenge filed against California AB-5

This entry was posted in Writing as business and tagged business California on by

The ride-sharing service Uber and the courier services company Postmates have filed a lawsuit to keep California’s AB-5 from going into effect. The complaint says that the legislation is “irrational and unconstitutional statute designed to target and stifle workers and companies in the on-demand economy.” The impact on contractors “irreparably harms network companies and app-based independent service providers by denying their constitutional rights to be treated the same as others to whom they are similarly situated.”

As I noted last week, this legislation is very bad news for freelance writers in California. Hopefully the courts will strike it down.

Fake news or sloppy writing?

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged chemistry fake news stupidity USA Today on by

People get outraged when news media publish fake news. They seldom consider the possibility that the people writing these stories aren’t lying but just ignorant. An outrageous example popped up recently in a USA Today article on road salt. It contains this astonishing sentence:

There’s less mystery about the chemistry. Road salt typically consists of sodium and chloride. While sodium is less water soluble and lodges in soil, the vast majority of chloride washes away with the rain.

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California’s war on freelance writers

This entry was posted in Writing Writing as business and tagged business California regulation on by

California’s AB-5, which I wrote about earlier, is now law. This is bad news for freelance writers in the state. It’s already cutting into writers’ earning ability. People are already losing work. Some businesses have stopped hiring California writers.

The bill’s supporters in the legislature pretend it’s for the freelancers’ own good. They shouldn’t be working in such low-paying jobs! Certainly some writers work for sadly low rates. It’s the best choice for some people, especially ones with limited mobility or other handicaps. Some of them have few alternatives and need the money to break even. Others love writing and would like to make some money at it, even if it’s not a lot.

But influential unions can’t organize self-employed people. It’s hard to ensure that they pay all their taxes. Uber and Lyft drivers compete with taxis. Those are the real reasons for restricting self-employment.
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A brief update on ContentGather

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I just came across a complaint about ContentGather on Reddit. The claim is that ContentGather suspended the poster’s account without warning or explanation. I can’t verify the authenticity of the post, but it fits with my impression of them.

According to other reports I’ve seen, ContentGather is adamant about submitting only original material that has never been submitted anywhere else. Normally they shouldn’t be able to spot recycling, but there are customers who reject articles and then use them without paying. If this happens to you and CG’s plagiarism checker catches it, you should expect your account to be suspended or terminated. You get punished again for being cheated.

It’s their choice how to do business, but CG just doesn’t pay enough for me to send them anything but articles that have failed to find another home. I removed all but one of my articles from their queue. They required payment to remove the last one, so I left it there.

Note on Medium

This entry was posted in My writing Writing and tagged Medium writing on by

My income from my articles on Medium.com in November is down from October, even though I have more articles up.

This is what I was afraid would happen. The removal of “claps” as a determiner of income means that whatever gets opened the most gets the biggest share of the income. Writers with a small but enthusiastic following lose with the new scheme. The pages that get opened the most are the ones that appear on the homepage. The ones on politics, society, and culture that get listed there are mostly fanatically statist. (Edit: I should have added that some titles are clear cases of race-baiting. Edit 2: And outright racism at times. I just spotted an article, prominently featured on Medium’s home page, with the title “Lindsey Graham’s Hypocrisy is a Product of Whiteness.” I don’t know if the editors selected that article, or if it popped to the top because so many readers clapped it. Either thought makes me want to throw up.)

There’s a section on the homepage for writers I follow. It lists only four items at any given time, while the list of articles the editors are pushing is huge. Evidently Medium doesn’t want to encourage writers to build their own following.

I don’t know if I’ll bother posting any more articles there.

In more encouraging news, I’ve finished the first draft of The Magic Battery!

New Jersey bill attacks freelancers

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing as business and tagged freelancing New Jersey regulation on by

A bill in the New Jersey legislature could mean trouble for freelance writers. It bans freelance contract work that doesn’t meet all of the following requirements:

a. The individual has been and will continue to be free from control or direction over the performance of the service, both under the individual’s contract of service and in fact; and

b. The individual’s service is either outside the usual course of the business for which that service is performed; and

c. The individual is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, profession or business of the same nature as that involved in the work performed.

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How writers should deal with Internet bullying

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged Internet writing on by

There’s an old Internet saying: “Don’t feed the trolls.” It’s still excellent advice. When people communicate with you only to get you upset, the best answer is usually no answer.

Some authors have been subjected to online harassment by cultural segregationists. Their crime is to write something which is not permitted to their race or ethnic group. A bunch of racists piled on Amélie Wen Zhao for the offense of depicting a fantasy world in which slavery isn’t limited to people with dark skins. (There’s a real-world counterpart: China, which is where Zhao comes from.) Some of these bigots said that people with yellow skins shouldn’t write about slavery at all. They temporarily intimidated her into withdrawing her book from publication.
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Beware of fake statistics 1

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged research writing on by

Some research I recently did for an article turned up a statistic that would have made a nice centerpiece: 60% of small businesses that experience cyberattacks go out of business within six months! If I were a hack writer, I could just have run with it; it’s “confirmed” on plenty of websites. But it smelled phony.

First, what exactly is it counting? It doesn’t even say “successful” cyberattacks. Let’s assume it means that, though. Almost every business falls victim to some malware. The consequences can be small or huge. It might contact a server that no longer exists and do nothing. It might attempt to encrypt files for ransomware but fail. It might mine for cryptocurrency, send spam, or try to enlarge a botnet. Those are all bad but won’t usually destroy the business.

Second, how much of the correlation is causation? Small businesses have high mortality rates in general. It just isn’t plausible that cyberattacks are wiping out huge numbers of small companies.
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